DRESSING AND UNDRESSING THE PRINCESS OF CADIGNAN: FEMALE DRAPERY/NARRATIVE STRIPTEASE

Romanic Review, May 2004 by Moger, Angela S

This functional slippage may ultimately relate to a quite different perspective on gender emanating from the plot. That is, what are we to make of the outcome of events? The urgent insistence on the heroine's depravity manipulates the reader to believe there will be a collapse, but Diane's evil reaps the recompense of innocence when her chicanery engenders the great good of "first love." It is not only that the story implies that Diane's superiority as an artist redeems, neutralizes, any moral inferiority; but also that the "reward" accorded Diane appears to represent a feminist stance.

The story, in effect, refuses to ratify the notion that there are some behaviors appropriate only to man and inappropriate in woman. In other words, the story itself confirms the argument of d'Arthez's defense at d'Espard's final dinner. He responds to the slanderous comments of his dinner companions, not by attempting to counter them but, to their amazement, by displacing the argument onto different grounds.7 He confronts the interpretational bias as such: "Le plus grand tort de cette femme est d'aller sur les brisées des hommes ... Elle dissipe comme eux des biens paraphernaux, elle envoie ses amants chez les usuriers, elle dévore des dots, elle ruine des orphelins, elle fond de vieux châteaux, elle inspire et commet peut-être aussi des crimes, mais ..." (1002-3). D'Arthez points out that the Princess has done nothing that is not done every day by men, that at least she does not calumniate former "partners in crime"-as they are now doing-and that their surprise over a woman's taking revenge by toying with men as they do with women infers that woman is less than man. D'Arthez's argument, based on the parity of the sexes is thus: "If she were a man, you wouldn't make this attack." The relationship between signifier and signified is at issue when he suggests that these would be words of praise if it were a man being talked about and when he asks, by inference, how they become words of condemnation. In the same way Mme d'Espard, the person who animates both every attention and every attack, is the other blatant example of a single signifier productive of two incompatible signifieds. This semiotic confusion, this double signified and the aforementioned double signifier (the emphatic surrogacy pattern discussed above), posits two people occupying the same role and one person in two roles.8 It should now be recalled that the metaphor invoked above was "musical chairs," an exercise which comes down to the "chaired" and the "non-chaired." As with the computer whose language permits of on/off, it is an unequivocally binary system. And, indeed, one might contend that Balzac's story features an overdeterminism of the binary that empties it of significance and, further, that some other textual clues constitute the proposition that the essence of both narrative and gender lies in their neutralization of the binary. Consider the Balzacian overture, so often characterized by what seems like idle, "situational" chatter. The opening of "Les secrets" deals successively with the aftermath of the July Revolution, the whereabouts of the Prince of Cadignan, and, finally, the question of which title is more important in France, that of Duke or that of Prince.