Shouting down Abraham: how sixteenth century Huguenot Women found their voice

Renaissance Quarterly, Summer, 1997 by Catharine Randall

Finally, d'Aubigne speaks of a Genevan woman, Loyse Sarrasin. Although he purports to admire this woman greatly, he nevertheless portrays her as hamstrung by her femininity. Although capable of much, she is permitted little. "Honored by many learned men . . . having acquired all forms of wisdom," d'Aubigne writes, "she would have been capable, if her sex had permitted her, to give public instruction."(31) Her space for action is instead limited to her "cabinet," which d'Aubigne describes as a sort of "prison." This female scene curtails rather than facilitates her role in any public transmission of knowledge. However, the spatial limitation that d'Aubigne describes has the unexpected consequence of subordinating his literary production to her exigencies, at least as that writing occurs within her space: "She used her abilities to compel me by remonstrances, in the prison she made of her small room, as though for a child of twelve or thirteen, to write Greek verse and to do the translations to which she set me."(32) D'Aubigne next cites a poem about Loyse, thereby further containing both his and her poetic production as if within a set of recessed boxes. Not surprisingly, the poem that he cites frames Loyse within a private space in which her activity is limited to illustrating male attainments or urging women to further accomplishments.

D'Aubigne concludes by naming his mother, whom he had significantly omitted at the beginning of his autobiography, and stipulating instead the name of his father as that which licensed textual production. Here, however, it is appropriate that d'Aubigne cite his speechless mother as a model for his silent (and, by this letter, emphatically silenced) daughters. She, too, is a pre-text for his endeavors, "she of whom her son writes although he never saw or heard her."(33) The only way he knows his mother's intellect is through marginalia penned in her copy of the life of Saint Basil, and that writing is, of course, suspect to a Reformer because of its Catholicity. Here again, woman's writing is marginalized. It leans upon the solid block of male text for its only support. Without the male, it would be nonexistent. At best, it is a specious, misinformed gloss.

D'Aubigne underscores the futility of female learning, thereby thwarting the purported aims of his mysteriously nonexistent "Logique des filles" by concluding that "the usefulness of women of any such knowledge . . . is practically inapplicable to young women of middling estate, such as you are, for some such unfortunate women have abused, rather than profited, from it."(34) He reminds his daughters that their determination is biological "for when the nightingale has children . . . she sings no more."(35) Women's biological role, to produce offspring, thus both necessitates and produces her silence. (Interestingly, however, the gender of the nightingale is masculine. This suggests the existence of a male anxiety concerning the circumstances of his own literary production. Is d'Aubigne thereby telling his daughters that their very existence has, in some way, hampered his own speech?) A mythological intertext further reinforces the silencing, when Ovid recounts how the tongue of Philomel, the nightingale, was ripped out in order to prevent her speech that would condemn the man who raped her. The mythological intertext also adds the implicit threat of violence to the ploy of reinforcing the domestic role of women. D'Aubigne thus returns women to the constricted space, the holy household of the Calvinist norm, in which the father acts as patriarch and preceptor of the family, and the woman remains subordinate: "I'll say yet again that excessive augmentation of the intellect so inflates the heart, from which thing I have seen two evils result: the dislike of housework and of thriftiness, condescension toward a less-learned husband, and great strife and disharmony."(36)