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CLOTHING "DAME HELISENNE": THE STAGING OF FEMALE AUTHORSHIP AND THE PRODUCTION OF THE 1538 ANGOYSSES DOULOUREUSES QUI PROCEDENT D'AMOURS
Romanic Review, Nov 2001 by Chang, Leah L
It is, of course, impossible to determine whether or not the writer of the Angoysses Douloureuses had secured Janot as a printer at the time of composing the epilogue. More importantly, however, Janot's role is absorbed into the story, transforming the physical means of collecting and disseminating the many personae and voices in the work into the climax of the tale. Rather than a process that remains exclusive from the creation of the literary text, printing in Paris becomes an essential element of the narrative. It is a climax that is ideally ad infinitum for the story of the lovers will be available to the public for as long as the book remains in publication and accessible to readers, thanks to the printer. In light of Quezinstra's epilogue, Janot's presence in the title pages and colophons takes on new meaning beyond either self-advertisement or a way of representing the different faces of Dame Helisenne, to become the step that completes the circular trajectory of the reader's relation to the book. The first title page acts with the other instruments of print as the proof that Quezinstra has done his job, and that the lovers are in some sense vindicated through the book's publication. By the last page of the epilogue, the 1538 Angoysses Douloureuses seems to have back-tracked on itself, showing its audience another story that may be read on the title pages and through the plot - the story of the book's inevitable success.
The absorption of Janot into the story, however, does not fully explain the significance of the "De Crenne" figure or its rapport with "Dame Helisenne." Possibly, "De Crenne" functions as an authorial alter-ego whose authority stands in distinct opposition to Dame Helisenne, embodied in a patronymic that complicates the relation between the author and printer figures. For, as a female authorial figure, Dame Helisenne takes a wholly passive role toward the printing of her white book. She dies, after all, in the final vignette, and the publication is enabled by distinctly male figures: Mercury, Quezinstra, Jupiter, and ultimately Janot. And yet, just as the fluidity of Dame Helisenne's authornarrator-character roles prevents the reader from pinning down her relation to the text, so the presence of the mysterious "De Crenne" figure on the title pages suggests that the reader should hesitate from ascribing Dame Helisenne's meekness in the plot to the actual writer of the work. Just as there is no guarantee that Dame Helisenne is anything other than a fictive character, there is no guarantee that her declarations of humility are anything other than mere pretension - posturing, fiction, and dissimulation to a seduce an audience through her protestations, and draw them into a succes a scandale. Part of this titillating appeal resides in the enigma of the plot and protagonist: the audience cannot tell if the scandalous story is fictive or true, cannot resolve if the protagonist is a real or imagined woman, and cannot determine whether the "author" is better reflected in the names "Dame Helisenne" or "De Crenne." The appeal of this uncertainty recalls the intense attraction that Helisenne's clothed body in the story held for her observers, who were drawn more to the female body that they could not really see than to the face that lay bare to the public.
