Displacements of Power: Readings of the 'Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles' (review)

David A. Fein challenges his reader by raising previously unasked critical questions about the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. His study of seven nouvelles (43, 1, 55, 33, 28, 38 and 99) is grounded in the theory that behind every seduction or deception lies the desire to undermine and displace another person's power. Fein notes that few scholars have addressed the pervasive issue of power in the nouvelles. He also states that studies of this text 'invariably tend toward a horizontal rather than a vertical approach' (p. 10), where the emphasis lies on points of intersection between the nouvelles, rather than a careful reading of individual tales. While this may be true, it is not clear how even a close reading of particular tales could not also include a discussion of the common elements found throughout the work. In his focused study, Fein tries to untie the complicated knot of power and authority by understanding the political, economic, lexical and sexual meaning of the nouvelles. He effectively relies on political and economic accounts of Philippe le Bon's court and relates the real-life anxieties and preoccupations of its occupants to those of the inhabitants of the nouvelles' fictional world. This approach reaps positive and convincing results. In the forty-third nouvelle, the greedy and hard-working husband is aptly compared to the merchants of Tournai who sacrificed their dignity in exchange for money. Similarly, the tax collector in the first nouvelle is recognizable by his ability to appraise and confiscate all goods, including a merchant's wife. On a lexicological level, Fein provides compelling readings of verbs such as matter in the fifty-fifth nouvelle in order to prove which character is the most powerful. Here, Fein notes the relationship between chess and sex when a sick girl 'checkmates' her sexual partner by proving her insatiable sexual appetite while at the same time transmitting her fatal disease. Less convincing is Fein's discussion of the sexual politics in each nouvelle. Twice he mentions Laura Mulvey's 'scopophilic gaze', but in both cases — nouvelles 33 and 1 — the analysis falls short. Although Fein recognizes the intense pleasure and power associated with the gaze, he does not fully question the correlation between looking and power in the nouvelles. While part of Fein's project is admittedly to consider each nouvelle separately, a comparison of adultery and the power shifts that result from such relationships might also have been productive. This is especially true of nouvelle 38, where a wife openly humiliates her husband by cheating on him and stealing his property, and nouvelle 99, where a husband permits his wife to commit adultery so long as she does it quietly: at this point a section comparing private and public humiliations and a discussion of the variety of adulteries present in the collection would have strengthened Fein's argument. This aside, Fein's attention to political, economic and lexicological issues and their relationship to power struggles in the text offer an important starting point for a new generation of studies of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles.