Les Femmes au Grand Siècle — Le Baroque

Edited by David Wetsel and Frédéric Canovas. (Biblio 17, 144). Tübingen, Gunter Narr, 2003. 272 pp. The distinctly unwieldy title of this volume suggests that it contains three principal sections. And so it does, but not quite in the way one would expect. By far the greatest portion of the volume is taken up with Part i, on ‘Les femmes au Grand Siècle’. Parts ii and iii are entitled ‘Le Baroque: musique et littérature’ and ‘NASSCFL teaching Proposal: 2001 Winning Essay’ and feel very much like appendages to what has come before. Each appendage contains valuable and interesting work (including Perry Gethner on madness in opera and Patricia Ranum on Jean Gilles's Requiem mass of c. 1700), but their inclusion increases the sense of unevenness that so often characterizes the publication of conference proceedings (in this case of the thirty-third annual conference of NASSCFL held in Arizona State University in 2001). A volume dedicated simply to the contents of Part i (with clearer sub-divisions) might have been more successful. The women under scrutiny include nuns and ‘précieuses’, heroines and martyrs as well as lovers and housewives. Two essays are included on fairytales, a genre ultimately made famous by Charles Perrault, but pioneered by a series of female authors who used their writing as a means to challenge the status of women in contemporary society. The first is by Roswitha Böhm, who observes that Mme d'Aulnoy's princesses are more talkative than her princes who are passive and quiet, while, in a similar vein, Giovanna Summerfield shows in her article how Aimée in Aulnoy's L'Oranger et l'abeille behaves like the consummate knight. Another woman with an agenda on gender is the playwright Marie-Anne Barbier (whose work belongs strictly to the early eighteenth century), whose ‘femmes fortes’, according to Alicia Montoya, are strikingly eloquent compared with those created by male authors. After all these ‘femmes fortes’, it is something of a relief to read about some ‘femmes faibles’ in Marie-Christine Pioffet's piece on the difference between literary accounts of shipwrecked men and women. For men, we find a detailed description of their heroic battle against the elements, whereas the women are so shell-shocked that they can barely remember the experience. This distinction is especially striking in a comparison of shipwrecks endured by Clélius and by his wife, Sulpicie in Mlle de Scudéry's Clélie: Clélius's valiant struggle is described at length, whereas Sulpicie's (decidedly fetishistic) experience is passed over in a few lines before she is saved by a virile slave. It is always a pleasure to learn of a new discovery and so it is the case with Paul Scott's unearthing from the depths of the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal of L'Illustre philosophe ou l'histoire de saincte Catherine d'Alexandrie (1663) by a nun called De La Chapelle. Scott's discovery is not interesting solely because of its novelty, but also because of the playwright's treatment of her heroine. As indicated in the play's title, La Chapelle's Catherine's martyrdom takes second place to her evident qualities as an intellectual — a lesson to us all perhaps

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