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Building the ideal city: Female memorial praxis in Christine de Pizan's Cite des Dames

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Spring 2003 by McCormick, Betsy

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2 While contemporary criticism has tended to focus on the anti-feminist stance, the classi- cal and medieval debate consistently presented itself as a binary dialogue, encompassing both anti-feminist and pro-feminist positions: either blaming Woman for her inherent evil, usually defined as inconstancy and fickleness, or praising her essential goodness, defined as her constancy and stability. The debate as a two-sided dialectic of both blame and praise is a subject only recently addressed in the critical literature: see Glenda McLeod, Virtue and Venom; Alcuin Blamires, Karen Pratt, and C. W. Marx; Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, "Jean de Fevre's Livre de Leesce: Praise or Blame of Women?"; and Alcuin Blamires, The case /or Women in Medieval Culture. See also the series of articles examining the debate tradition throughout the medieval period in the recent anthology Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance, edited by Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees.

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3 Quotations from La Livre de la Cite des Dames are cited by page number from the edition by Maureen Cheney Curnow. English translations are cited by page number from the trans- lation by Earl Jeffrey Richards.

4 As Roberta Krueger asks: "Did women accept without questioning either misogynistic attacks or idealization?" (30).

5 The "querelle de la Rose" was a late fourteenth-century French literary debate over the reception of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's Le Roman de la Rose. see Eric Hicks; see also Joseph L. Baird and John R. Kane.

6 Judith Fetterly explains that, "as readers and teachers and scholars, women are taught to think as men, to identify with a male point of view, and to accept as normal and legitimate a male system of values, one of whose central principles is misogyny," which results in women who are "immasculated" readers (xx). Although analyzing American texts, Fetterly's conception of the immasculated reader-and that of the reader who "resists" such immas- culation by reading the female back into the text-can be usefully applied to many literary periods. In a more medieval context, Susan Schibanoff suggests that the misogynist text is a "fixed" structure, already systematically arranged "in 'Christine's' mentality and memory and in the written traditions of Western literature and philosophy" (85-86).

7 Wolfgang lser has described this kind of receptive division as one that is not "between the subject and object, but between subject and himself (155). Note also that, for Iser, the read- er is always male.

8 This allegory of the superficial female reader was often combined with another metaphor of gendered reading as an "attack on the body of the text's truth," which gave the "image of destructive reader as female its special appeal, especially for authors who are male" (Noakes, Timely Reading 109). see also Noakes's discussion of how women are depicted as misread- ers throughout the Western tradition in "On the Superficiality of Women."

9 Notably, the "querelle" itself demonstrates that principle in action: "Inadvertently, Jean's defenders proved Christine's point. Although they continued to justify the morality of the Roman on the basis of an ideal reading-their reading-increasing frustration with Christine's attack led them to admit that other readers were, in fact, understanding the work differently, or, in their terms, misreading it" (Schibanoff 94; italics hers).

Building the ideal city: Female memorial praxis in Christine de Pizan's Cite des Dames

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Spring 2003 by McCormick, Betsy

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