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NOVEL UPBRINGINGS: EDUCATION AND GENDER IN CHOISY AND LA FAYETTE
Romanic Review, Jan 2006 by Harris, Joseph
Reflecting on the various developments in novelistic convention and vraisemblance that had taken place in the half-century between the publication of d'Urfé's pastoral romance L'Astrée and La Fayette's masterpiece La Princesse de Clèves, critic Mitchell Greenberg ponders how many readers of the latter work "would not be disconcerted were the Duc de Nemours to appear at the engagement ball dressed in drag?".1 In his positing of the Princesse's dance with Nemours as "emblematic of what I will call the scenario of Classical desire," Greenberg implies that late seventeenth-century French texts are structured around a binary sense of "sexual symmetry" which leaves no space for the more dissident gender categories associated with earlier works.2
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Even if one disagrees with his potentially reductive use of the term 'Classical,' it might nonetheless come as something of a surprise to discover that the supposedly "disconcerting" scenario Greenberg imagines does in fact have a precursor in late seventeenth-century French prose.3 Indeed, scarcely two decades after the first appearance of La Princesse de Clèves, a curious short tale entitled "Histoire de la Marquise-Marquis de Banneville" (1695) would pick up several of the themes and motifs of the initial encounter between La Fayette's main characters and subject them to just the sort of gender inversion which Greenberg envisages. At a royal ball, the young aristocratic heroine of this tale is approached by a prince and their subsequent dance together attracts the amazement and admiration of all onlookers-the one principal difference from Greenberg's scenario being that here the heroine, and not her dance partner, is the one who is actually in "drag."
With a few exceptions, commentators have generally agreed that "Histoire de la Marquise-Marquis de Banneville" was written by François-Timoléon, abbé de Choisy, possibly with assistance from Charles Perrault or his niece Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier de Villandon, and I shall follow this general consensus here. Choisy, as he confesses quite frankly in his astonishing memoirs, was himself an enthusiastic cross-dresser.4 Furthermore, as his writings on the subject demonstrate, Choisy's tastes were not limited simply to the practice of cross-dressing; indeed, cross-dressing appears not only as a plot device in both the tale and his memoirs, but also as a source of descriptive and contemplative pleasure in its own right. Lavish descriptions of female attire abound throughout his tale and memoirs, as do episodes which demonstrate the power of cross-dressed beauty without advancing the plot in any way; indeed, if fetishism can be denned as a "partial arrest of the metonymie function"5 then one could well characterize Choisy's attitude to female attire as fetishistic. Significantly, while its equivalent in La Fayette's novel is crucial to the events that follow, the ball scene in Choisy's tale is precisely one of these (in narrative terms at least) entirely gratuitous episodes.
My comparison between Choisy's short story and La Fayette's novel is not in itself a new one; indeed, Greenberg refers in passing to Choisy's crossdressed heroine as a "mirror image" of La Fayette's heroine in a more recent article, while Joan Dejean has also hinted briefly at a parallel between the two characters.6 Possibly the first commentator to note this resemblance was Elizabeth Guild, who in 1994 proposed that Choisy's tale could be read as a "less than decorous parody" of La Fayette's novel, particularly in its depiction of the mother-daughter relationship.7 These commentators, however, are content to point towards the similarity between the two narratives; none offers a sustained comparison of the two. In this article I shall follow Guild's lead and pursue the intriguing parallel between the two texts, in particular by comparing the social, moral and sentimental education orchestrated by the protagonists' mothers. As I shall demonstrate, not only can Choisy's tale be read as a light-hearted and affectionate parody of La Fayette's novel, but its intertextual relationship with the latter can also shed new light on both La Princesse de Clèves itself and Choisy's own fraught and ambiguous relationship to female authority in general.
Of course, since Choisy's tale transposes the genuinely female Princesse de Clèves into the biologically male and cross-dressed Marquise de Banneville, a more appropriate word than Guild's "parody" might be "travesty." In this respect, Choisy's tale comes closer to recombining the two cognates, travesty and travestissement, than many earlier seventeenth-century works; indeed, earlier works had tended to use cross-dressing as a means of parody only when the original work being parodied had already featured cross-dressing in some form or another. In the 162Os, for example, Charles Sorel had paralleled and parodied the cross-dressed episodes of L'Astrée through his quixotic anti-hero Lysis, who confesses to having "tousjours eu beaucoup d'envie" to dress as a woman in imitation of his pastoral hero Céladon,8 while Du Verdier had burlesquely complicated the sixteenth-century Amadis de Gaule by having a genuinely female character pretend to be Dara'ide, the disguised female persona of the prince Agésilan de Colchos.9
