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NOVEL UPBRINGINGS: EDUCATION AND GENDER IN CHOISY AND LA FAYETTE
Romanic Review, Jan 2006 by Harris, Joseph
Strategies of Education
As I mentioned earlier, Choisy's tale invites many parallels with La Fayette's novel, particularly in terms of their portrayal of the educational process. Both stories concern young aristocratic women who are brought up in isolation by single, widowed, mothers. Both mothers charge themselves with educating their daughters, and when they introduce them to the galanterie of the French court their precepts are put into practice. In both cases, the heroine falls in love, against the wishes of her mother and of the society in general, and decides to keep this love secret. When the mother's intuition tells her of her daughter's secret passion, she speaks out against it, forbidding the daughter to consummate her desires. However, the mother then dies, leaving the daughter without a mentor and thus having to struggle between her inculcated moral beliefs and her forbidden love for another man. This, however, is where the two heroines' narratives diverge. Whereas La Fayette's Princesse famously follows her mother's teaching and repudiates Nemours, Choisy's Little Marquise gives in to her passion and weds her suitor Bercour, who-to the reader's probable lack of surprise-then turns out to be a woman dressed as a man, thus re-establishing the heterosexual norm.
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But it is worth looking in more detail at the similarities and differences between the two protagonists and the ways they are brought up, especially as both mothers are depicted as being unique in the educational programs they set out for their daughters. Typically for the literary and aesthetic conventions of the period, both daughters are blonde-haired, pale in complexion, and astonishingly beautiful; La Fayette's is "une beauté parfaite,"17 while Choisy's is "d'une beauté achevée" (HMMB, p. 973). This similarity is so conventional it would hardly be worthy of note, of course, were it not for the curious fact that in both cases their beauty is attributed not simply to nature but also to the efforts of their mothers. Indeed, Madame de Chartres's educational program explicitly works on two levels, the physical or external and the spiritual or internal: "elle ne travailla pas seulement à cultiver son esprit et sa beauté; elle songea aussi à lui donner de la vertu et à la lui rendre aimable" (FC, p. 248).
The throwaway tone of the first clause here should not distract us from its curious suggestion that beauty is something that one's educators can somehow foster and take credit for.18 As if to parody La Fayette, Choisy spells out rather less subtly exactly how Madame de Banneville manages to cultivate her daughter's beauty. After describing the Little Marquise's various charms, Choisy concedes: "II est vrai qu'on l'avait un peu contrainte dès l'enfance avec des corps de fer, afin de lui faire venir des hanches, et de lui faire remonter la gorge" (HMMB, p. 973). The process of cultivating beauty discreetly passed over in La Fayette's account is here rendered burlesque both by Choisy's reference to iron bodices, and by the ironic understatement of "un peu."
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