NOVEL UPBRINGINGS: EDUCATION AND GENDER IN CHOISY AND LA FAYETTE

Yet Choisy does not limit himself to what could be called "authorial" crossdressing here. Indeed, he also stipulates both the age and sex of his intended readers, thus inviting his real readers to indulge in a little imaginary role-play of their own and to take on the role of young girls:

Voici donc mon coup d'essai; vous en jugerez, mesdemoiselles, car c'est à vous à qui je m'adresse; mais si vous avez passé vingt ans, je vous défends de me lire. Cherchez quelque chose de plus solide. Une fille à vingt ans doit songer à se faire bonne ménagère, et le temps du badinage est bien avancé pour elle. (HMMB, p. 973)

By presenting herself as someone concerned about the proper occupations of young women, Choisy's narrator might seem to suggest that she is offering an appropriate, salutary tale for the edification of her female readers-much as La Fayette's Madame de Chartres seems to do with her daughter. At the same time, both works also challenge their own claims to exemplarity. The famous concluding paradox of La Fayette's novel-the "exemples de vertu inimitables" which the heroine leaves behind (FC, p. 395)-thwarts any desire on the reader's part to extract any clear-cut moral or mode of conduct from the novel. In her very uniqueness, the Princesse defies exemplarity. The same could well be said of Choisy's protagonist, whose situation is so exceptional that it would be very difficult to find a lesson, salutary or otherwise, in his strange tale. Yet whereas the paradox of La Fayette's heroine is spelled out only at the end of her tale, Choisy debunks any educational pretensions his narrative might have from the very start. After all, Choisy's narrator actually dismisses her own tale as mere "badinage" unworthy of women over twenty, who should have better things to do with their time. By proposing such flimsy works as her own as appropriate reading matter for younger girls, Choisy's narrator suggests that these younger girls are in fact less susceptible to the corrupting power of narrative than their elders. Instead of proposing that youth is susceptible to outside influences which might last into adult life, then (the apparent message suggested by his heroine's curious upbringing), Choisy here delineates youth from adulthood as a period of non-serious "badinage" in which flimsy and playful works such as his own are adequate and harmless reading matter.

As we have seen, then, Choisy's "Histoire de la Marquise-Marquis de Banneville" finds him negotiating both his own idiosyncratic upbringing at the hands of his mother, and his curious relationship to Madame de La Fayette. For Choisy, La Fayette was an authority figure on two counts: both as someone able to authorize his own adult cross-dressing and as a successful, published author in her own right. In an oddly feminized version of Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence," then, La Fayette's novel provides Choisy with a feminine parent-text which he attempts both to pay homage to and to overthrow. However, while his own protagonist is passively shaped by his mother's curious educational regime, Choisy himself takes a more active, creative role, reworking La Fayette's text and renegotiating her claims to authority and authorship. Consequently-as I have suggested-La Fayette's and Choisy's works can be mutually illuminating, particularly in their portrayal of education. While the mother-daughter relationship in La Fayette's novel offers Choisy a blueprint for his own tale, the changes Choisy makes can reveal underexplored aspects of the original. Indeed, even the most radical change Choisy makes-to have his protagonist brought up cross-dressed-can be seen to have its seeds in La Fayette's original; the cross-dressed narcissism which Madame de Banneville encourages in her daughter corresponds to, and throws into relief, the Princesse de Clèves's intense investment in her self-image instilled in her by her mother. Ultimately, then, her cross-dressing marks out Choisy's protagonist as having attained, albeit inadvertently and in a burlesque fashion, the uniqueness to which La Fayette's heroine strives.