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

Renaissance Quarterly, Summer, 1997 by Catharine Randall

That was the last straw! Then Virtue lost patience as she listened at the door

With her entrance, the sun shone and gilded with its rays the bedroom and the bed.

Virtue appeared in the guise of a well-dressed matron.

She took her seat at the head of the bed,

Seized the trembling hand of her speechless child,

And reassured him with a chaste kiss.(42)

Like d'Aubigne's mother's ghostly apparition, Vertu's appearance deprives the male of speech. Unlike d'Aubigne's mother, however, because Vertu is an allegorical figure, and not a flesh and blood female, she is empowered to speak. Also, because she is not a monstrous female, her words make sense:

And she spoke thus: "My son . . . Receive from my hand and choose among the colors and flowers I hold . . . Those you will adopt for your own use always. Be self-possessed, my son, and self-contained, So as to avoid all that is superfluous to your needs. Observe your own boundaries closely, Pull yourself into yourself, Seek to appear less, and, in so doing, you will be more.(43)

What Vertu really proffers here is a sort of speech. She seems to be holding a bouquet of possibilities in the "colors and flowers" of rhetoric. Here again, the woman is pre-text for the male's self-fashioning, both of his person and of his speech. She is the generative cornucopia of his textual capacities as he selects from an array of options that she makes available to him but cannot herself exercise. Like d'Aubigne's mother, Vertu's description of what sort of speech he should speak verges on non-speech. Interestingly, however, Vertu advises d'Aubigne to imitate what he has qualified as acceptable female speech. Such speech is typified by circumspection, sobriety, and moderation, rather than "superfluo" In addition, it is characterized by interiority ("retire toi dans toi"), or even a reclusiveness, a folding back into the self that is certainly biologically more apt for the female model than for the externalized male sex thrusting its way into, and asserting itself in, the world. Finally, Vertu's model for speech is exclusively biblical. Vertu makes her appearance at the conclusion of the second book of Les tragiques, just as Catherine is featured near the end of the first book. This structural similarity suggests that Vertu's model for both writing and femininity acts as an antidote to Catherine's monstrous distortion of both. Additionally, however, as noted, Vertu's exhortations are self-undoing, and deny power to her gender.

Another counterpart to the monstrous figure is the exemplary figure of the woman. Lady Jane Grey is a particularly salient example. Although d'Aubigne lauds her for her courage in the face of death and records her desire to communicate and make a confession of faith before the audience, it is important that Jane does not vocalize her statement, unlike the voiced, articulate male figures of martyrs included in Les tragiques. Rather, she signifies through signs:

The young Queen, Having on the scaffold only her gloves and her prayerbook with which to make testimony, Stripped off her gloves from her tiny, thin hands . . . Then gave her prayerbook to the tower guard, With these words written in it.(44)