"Tout mon office:" Body politics and family dynamics in the verse epitres of Marguerite de Navarre

Renaissance Quarterly, Winter, 2001 by Leah Middlebrook

Le groz ventre trop pesant et massif

Ne veult souffrir, au vray bon cueur naif,

Vous obeyr, complaire et satisfaire,

Ce que surtout ii desire de faire:

Car s'il cuide prandre Ia plume en main,

Ung ma1 de cueur le remect demain,

Et par doulleur souvent et passion

Il oublye sa bonne invention,

(76, 1-8) (50)

Marguerite invokes (and deflates) two common lyric pretexts for the composition of a poem here, the writer's inability to write and the notion of the heart "pregnant" with verse (readers of French literature may recall poem six of Ronsard's Amours de Cassandre, in which the speaker's breast is depicted as, "gros de germe avoit le ventre plein / D'oeufz non formez et deflaires nouvelle;" (10-11). [51] By rewriting the convention of male literary fecundity with the image of a full female womb, Marguerite thus reappropriates a useful literary conceit, but even as she does so she exposes the incommensurability of metaphorical and physical pregnancy: having labored with their wits and quills, male poets deliver themselves of a poem and have done with it. In contrast, once Marguerite completes her epitre she is still pregnant, still frustrated, and still suffering her exile in Navarre. As is the case in many of the epitres, poem 12 contains a dark subtext about the alienation Marguerite endures through her role in the family scheme. Hence in the subsequent passage, she begins to measure the distance that separates her from identification with the maternal, even as she enters the final stages of pregnancy:

Je ne vous puis au long mander ma vie,

De vous donner tel ennuy n'ay envie;

Mais s'il vous plaist scavoir quelle je suis,

Comparaison mieulx bailler ne vous puis

Que du rochier de Ceres, dont racompte

Eurialo, qui d'asseurer n'a honte

Que par douleur la pierre fut contraincte

A recevoir de leurs larmes l'empraincte.

(76, 17-23) (52)

It is not difficult to locate in Marguerite's contrasting images -- Ceres, the paradigm of maternal power, and her counterpart, the shrunken stone -- an association to the princess's own position vis-a-vis Louise in the trinite. Just as the stone selflessly received the tears of the goddess until it became shrunken and broken, so Marguerite has accepted the "fallout" of Louise's image through years of acting as her second, her "little corner." If in both cases the sacrifices are depicted as glorious, each results in a kind of death: the stone shatters, and Marguerite, pregnant poet, reaches a subjective crisis. Unable to think her trope through to its logical conclusion and identify herself with Ceres and with the role of mother, she consigns herself again to a position of sterility, this time as a woman, and not as a writer. By setting in place the parallel between her body and Ceres's rock, she transforms her swollen womb from a symbol of life to a sign of death, the death of her role in the family trinite. Ultimately stranded in her Pyrenean "desert," physically distant from court and the daily affairs of her mother and brother, Marguerite has had plenty of time to reflect on her changing role in the family, and to come to the conclusion that the life of a princess, like war, is hell. In epitre 14, she writes: