NOVEL UPBRINGINGS: EDUCATION AND GENDER IN CHOISY AND LA FAYETTE

Alone of all her Sex: Uniqueness and its Discontents

A comparison with Choisy's tale can, therefore, shed further light on the role played by amour-propre in the upbringing of La Fayette's heroine. Through his cross-dressed protagonist, Choisy paradoxically manages both to exaggerate and to invert the self-interest that underlies the Princesse de Clèves's character and behavior. At the same time, however, it could also be argued that Madame de Banneville's decision to bring up her biologically male child as a woman is already curiously prefigured in the unconventional educational program which Madame de Chartres establishes for her daughter. After all, in a very important sense, Madame de Chartres does not bring her daughter up to be a woman; indeed, on her deathbed she specifies that the last thing she wants the young Madame de Clèves to be is "comme les autres femmes." This somewhat euphemistic phrase for sexual galanterie will come to haunt La Fayette's protagonist, not least because her mother then adds that "si ce malheur vous doit arriver, je reçois la mort avec joie, pour n'en être pas le témoin" (PC, p. 278)-in effect making the Princesse complicit in her mother's death if she capitulates to her desires.

Of course, in singling her daughter out amongst her sex, Madame de Chartres does not mean that she wants her to be a man. Rather, she wants her to be exceptional in both her appearance and the virtue that underlies it, and this desire to be exceptional, to distinguish herself from all other women lies at the heart of the Princesse's various struggles throughout the novel. Consequently, although the Princesse is scarcely "masculine" according to most traditional criteria, the novel's stress on her uniqueness amongst her sex does have repercussions on its portrayal of gender more generally, not least in its disruption of traditional oppositions between masculine "force" and feminine "faiblesse."21

Madame de Chartres's teaching thus constructs in her daughter a sense of selfhood to which she is condemned to aspire. Accordingly, the rhetoric of "duty to oneself" is a recurrent one throughout the text, in phrases such as "songez ce que vous vous devez à vous-même" (PC, p. 278), and "Veux-je me manquer à moi-même?" (PC, p. 330). Although Choisy's little Marquise de Banneville is no less unique than the Princesse de Clèves, she finds it somewhat less of a struggle to match up to the self constructed and imposed by her mother. Unaware of her own disguise, the Little Marquise is secure in her identity and able to enjoy the acclaim that her exceptional beauty provokes in others. While La Fayette's heroine struggles to both appear and be virtuous, appearance and reality are set in stark opposition for Choisy's protagonist. In a sense, Choisy's protagonist is "passively" unique, set apart from her (biologically male) sex by her upbringing, while La Fayette's heroine must actively struggle to maintain the uniqueness she seeks.

Furthermore, the exceptional situation of Choisy's protagonist actually facilitates the tale's happy ending; owing to their unique but complementary situations, the Little Marquise and her cross-dressed lover turn out to be equally suited to each other. On the other hand, it is paradoxically the Princesse de Clèves's drive towards uniqueness that leads her to fall in love with the apparently unique Nemours in the first place. As she confesses, picking up the vocabulary of her mother's deathbed warning, "C'est pourtant pour cet homme, que j'ai cru si différent du reste des hommes, que je me trouve comme les autres femmes" (PC, p. 352). Like the Princesse, Nemours is marked out as different from his sex, and this uniqueness seems to authorize the Princesse's passion for him-just as, in Choisy's tale, Bercour's sexual uniqueness eventually justifies the heroine's passion for him. Ironically, of course, in La Fayette's novel Nemours's apparent uniqueness is what actually prompts the Princesse's downfall-her realization that she does, after all, resemble other women.