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

The tension in the scene of the cloak complicates the problem of Dame Helisenne's agency. What is the protagonist's role in the messages inscribed on her clothes? In fact, although Dame Helisenne is not master of the messages about her body conveyed on her clothing, it is she who chooses to clothe herself specifically in a white satin cloak and a scarlet dress and thus chooses her self-representation. And in this light, one must rethink whether Helisenne misdirects her irritation when she initially focuses so ardently on the injustice done to her cloak. For, as the clothes hide her body by covering it, they also define, represent, and in some sense become it; the female body is absorbed into the device of its representation, constructed through the appearance of its wrapping.10 And while her husband and lover seem to dispute a single meaning of her body and clothes - the body is either chaste or defiled, the cloak is either pure or marked with Guenelic's footprint - for Helisenne the meaning of her clothes moves beyond the black-and-white of bodily chastity and corruption to enter the more ambiguous and ambivalent domain of female sexual desire. In the scene of the cloak, both the husband and Guenelic appropriate and simplify the "text" that she wants to project to an audience that includes both men. The result is a friction between the male and female messages about the status of Helisenne's body/text.

Through competing male messages imprinted on the white cloak in the story, Helisenne is inscribed as a chaste or libidinous creature while her own authority to represent herself is somewhat obscured by the tension between husband and lover. This capacity to represent multiply and ambiguously is a quality the cloak shares with the title page of the first edition. Like the clothing, the title page reflects Dame Helisenne's self-presentation, her "memoirs," while simultaneously conveying another, male-authored message, this time from the printer Denys Janot. In both cases, Dame Helisenne's identity - as chaste wife or lover, or as author - is at stake; the little white book that Quezinstra decides to publish at the end of the story serves as a symbolic connection between the narrative and material production of the 1538 Angoysses Douloureuses.

As I discuss in the next section, Helisenne's cloak offers a metaphoric model of the relations between author and printer figures in the first edition, in place of concepts of copyright and textual ownership that did not exist in the sixteenth century. But the episode of the cloak also reveals a gendered dimension to the connection between material form and women's public representation. As Louise Labe will contend in 1555, women's clothes construct their identities even though they do not really belong to them. In her dedicatory epistle to her Euvres, she encourages women to turn to writing rather than clothing and jewelry, which she argues " ... ne pouvons vrayement estimer notres, que par usage."11 Her rejection of clothes ironically mimics the message of contemporary conduct literature, which identified sumptuous adornments as devices of women's dissimulation, vanity, and immodesty, and encouraged women to dress themselves instead in virtue.12 Labe, however, rejects clothing not because of its inventive capacity, but because women themselves do not own the instruments of this fashioning, and thus cannot claim to be in possession of their own construction. The Angoysses Douloureuses imply further that women's public construction can pivot around moral values linked with female sexuality, a cause for concern for women like Dame Helisenne if decisions about that form are not their own. The clothing trope in both texts suggests that physical form can reflect and inform meaning and value in gendered ways, an equation that extends, I would argue, to the material production of the 1538 Angoysses Douloureuses and the author figure associated with it. Like the white cloak of the story, the title page of the first edition is also inscribed with gendered messages in tension with one another: how, then, do the gendered polemics about Helisenne's represention - already metaphorized in the narrative through her cloak - invade the seemingly most typographical spaces of the volume?