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

Romanic Review, May 2004 by Moger, Angela S

Balzac's story closes with the overdeterminism of polarity with which it began. We are told that the Princess and d'Arthez have all but disappeared from the world and that d'Arthez's publications have "become exceedingly rare." Following those notations are the closing lines of the story: "Est-ce un dénouement? Oui, pour les gens d'esprit; non, pour ceux qui veulent tout savoir" (1005). Story line and narrative technique have come together as both d'Arthez and the text fall silent. What has been added at this ostensible closure is the explication of the role of the perceiver in establishing whether, "yes," this is a "dénouement," or, "no," it is not. The definition of what one confronts is not in the object but is instead governed by which reader is reading.9 And what of d'Arthez's speech to the assembled company at Mme d'Espard's dinner? Isn't he saying, "what you see depends on how you look at it"? His defense explicitly addresses the issue of gender ("what we call evil here, we would not call evil if done by a man, etc.") and suggests that the essence of gender is in its being mediated by which reader is reading. Given the way it plays with the binary and the way it empowers the woman, the story raises, by implication, the most fundamental question about gender. What is the essence of being female? Is it something more, or other, than being non-male?

As we have seen, the text undermines this kind of binary thinking in ways large and small, global and particular, thematic and formal-a woman is not good or bad, an ending is not open or closed, the narrator is not the "true" or the "right" set up to balance the "false" or the "wrong" of the protagonist-again, all the pairs seem to celebrate the subversion of polarity. "If I create a female character," says Margaret Atwood, author of the brilliant Handmaid's Tale, "I would like to be able to show her having the emotions all human beings have-hate, envy, spite, lust, anger, and fear, as well as love, compassion, tolerance, and joy-without having her pronounced a monster, a slur or a bad example. I would also like her to be cunning, intelligent, and sly, if necessary for the plot, without having her branded as a bitch goddess or a glaring instance of the deviousness of women."10 Balzac has created just such a female character in Diane of Cadignan who, in another story, "The Cabinet of Antiquities," appears riding horseback through the night across France, disguised as a man, to save a lover from ruin.

Two other aspects of Balzac's treatment of the subject are thought-provoking. First, it is noteworthy that this story depicts a revolution different in kind from the revolution it refers to, that of 1830; the other revolution is signaled by the coming to power of the female storyteller. The fiction-generating role is that of the female, while the "reading" role is male." The fictive issues from woman and works upon man-in fact, the male fiction writer is "consumed" at the end of the story. second, by all the lessons taught in the story, genre needs to be addressed with the same skepticism about the binary that the text appears to propose concerning gender.12 As suggested above, this tale so entirely focused on withholding and revelation seems to aim for the cancellation of such categories; and, if we are taught that the female cannot be defined merely in terms of what is non-male, we are also shown that narrative qua narrative is not a simple matter of progression from one side of a binary opposition to the other, a transition from concealment to revelation, from "secret" to disclosure.13 Story, it seems, is not circumscribed by a distinction between open and closed, nor accounted for by a dichotomy between truth and falsehood. A narrative is determined by the angle of vision-d'Arthez is told the same story others have heard and hears a completely different one. Therefore, like the difference woman incarnates-indeed, somewhat like the contradictory attitudes toward that gender traced by this story-the otherness that must mark a narrative for it to be one is a difference much larger than self-contained and symmetrical antitheses.