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In the Eye of the Beholder: The Rhetoric of Beauty and the Beauty of Rhetoric in the Heptaméron
- L'Esprit Créateur
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 57, Number 3, Fall 2017
- pp. 8-20
- 10.1353/esp.2017.0025
- Article
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Abstract
Beauty is full of contradictions in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron. While sometimes associated with truth and virtue, beauty (and its artful rhetoric) can also prove suspect. This article examines the representation of male and female charms in the nouvelles (focusing on tales 10 and 14), which seem to invite readers to deconstruct gendered notions of beauty, virtue, and nobility. Ultimately, Marguerite de Navarre’s text illustrates the performative and ethical failure of such concepts, especially when in service to misogynist discourses and practices of power used to dominate women.
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