“Exerçant œuvres viriles”: Feminine Anger and Feminist (Re)Writing in Hélisenne de Crenne

“Exerçant œuvres viriles” : Feminine Anger and Feminist (Re)Writing in Hélisenne de Crenne Jerry C. Nash T HE CLAIM HAS OFTEN BEEN MADE that women in early modern literature, both those writing it and those being written about or depicted in it, have very seldom explored the subject of “ women by women,” a seemingly modern subject of inquiry and revi­ sionary writing so central to the feminist movement as we know it today.1 I wish to offer here discussion of a clearly notable exception in the Renaissance, the case of Hélisenne de Crenne as female author and cen­ tral female character as both acquire meaning in her Epistres familieres et invectives of 1539.2In this early, highly neglected monument of femi­ nine anger and feminist (re)writing, Hélisenne already espouses what is unmistakably today the major principles and strategies of the feminist movement, those of “ reading like a woman” as Jane Marcus has recent­ ly called them or of “ the resisting reader” as Judith Fetterly also puts it in the very titles of their two seminal studies.3 Hélisenne’s Epistres— much more than her other better known and today more widely read Angoisses douloureuses, which she called one of her “ petites composi­ tions” (EI4/sig. 06v)—are remarkable for the way their author and cen­ tral character harness the resistant yet creative energies of anger in art. This is not done just passively for lamentation, as do so many feminist writings in the early modern period (including the Angoisses) and even beyond, but, to the contrary, actively for the purposes of “ feminist cri­ tique,” for the feminist causes of revision and rewriting of literary, cul­ tural, and intellectual history itself. This revision involves counter­ reading and debunking the conventional, centuries-handed-down wis­ dom and authority of an oppressive patriarchal ideology. Her rewriting is the participation by a woman in the unmaking and remaking of patriarchally written history. She supplements, and at times replaces, the founding fathers and subsequent male exemplars and enforcers of this ideology in literature, culture, and civilization with accomplished, powerful female role models. Both of these strategies of revision and rewriting come together in Hélisenne’s intriguing and defiant under­ standing and portrayal of “ performing manly works” : “ exerçant œuvres 38 W in t e r 1990 N ash viriles” (EF8/sig. K2V ). Through this central and unifying concern of the Epistres, Hélisenne posits, much ahead of her time, nothing less than the feminist transference of “ manly works” to the feminine domain, their redefinition and their rewriting, au féminin, in the service of art and social-intellectual progress. Hélisenne’s letters are combative and revisionary and poignant auto­ biographical constructs of feminine anger and its recourse to feminist writing. They reflect the transgressive, subversive, indeed deconstructive nature and role of all true feminist writing. But there is also in these let­ ters a determined feminine reconstructive impulse, and the latter is in particular what makes her the more powerful and effective as a writer, as the Renaissance writer of a cause—except of course to her husband and the other male antagonists in her letters, all those members of what she calls “ ce deceptif & frauduleux sexe viril” (EF5/sig. I3r) whom she addresses collectively at the end of her letters: “O mauldict & plus que mauldict, meschant & audacieux. O faulx dissimulateur, o meschant trahistre, qui ne sçauroit nyer qu’en toy n’habitent toutes deceptions, frauldes & collusions” (EI5/sig. P2r v). One might say that Hélisenne deconstructs in order to reconstruct. What she unmakes are fundamental and quite dangerous to the parties mentioned above: their blind deprecia­ tion of women in general and their “ collusions” in thwarting woman’s intellectual and creative potential, in short, the many abusive and unbearable instances of male domination and female exclusion in various realms of cultural-intellectual progress and public acts. Hélisenne’s sub­ versive letters, therefore, always aim for sexual equality, for cultural and intellectual parity. Let us look first at the feminine consciousness under­ lying these Epistres, at Hélisenne the character’s anger and deeply felt awareness of the need of revision, the need of...