Marguerite de Navarre’s Shifting Gaze: Perspectives on Gender, Class, and Politics in the Heptaméron by Elizabeth Chesney Zegura (review)

The “shifting gaze” of the title of Elizabeth Chesney Zegura’s recent monograph on the Heptaméron is a subversive one. In exquisite prose and with detailed textual analysis, Zegura investigates the many ways in which Marguerite de Navarre delves into subjects with which she is not normally associated. In addition to gender relations and sexual violence, thematics of the text that have been widely examined elsewhere, Zegura also uncovers pointed commentary on class relations and political structures. Always giving precise examples based on extended interpretations of the tales themselves, Zegura makes a unique contribution to existing scholarship on the Heptaméron by supplementing the more frequent aural metaphors used to describe the text’s complex structure, such as polyphony and plurivocity, with visual ones. That is, while most critics see Marguerite as staging the confrontation of diverse opinions via the multi-voiced discussions surrounding the stories, Zegura leads her reader through a “scopic maze” of “multiperspectivism”: the reader of the Heptaméron does not merely hear divergent voices, but also learns to see from a multiplicity of vantage points that lie above and below, within and without, the traditional power structures of Renaissance France.

The volume contains an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion, with copious endnotes following each of these sections, plus a useful bibliography and index. The introduction lays out the critical lens that Zegura will utilize in each of the chapters: namely, the many layers of Marguerite’s “shifting gaze” which Zegura interprets as eroding traditional notions of gender norms, patriarchy, social class, and political power. In addition to highlighting dozens of references to literal seeing and sight in the tales, Zegura also unearths the “revelatory diegetic gaze” on the part of each tale’s narrator, the “dialectics of dissimulation” apparent throughout the collection, and the characters’ and storytellers’ “divergent outlooks,” both within the tales and in the frame discussions (2–3). While acknowledging that ambiguity and dialogic discourse abound in French humanistic writings more generally, Zegura takes care to explore the unique ways in which Marguerite offers her reader a multiplicity of non-hegemonic perspectives, situated below and behind the prevailing ones: she narrates the experiences of women, of servants, of the ruled rather than the rulers, and at the same time she peels back surface appearances to reveal the hidden, yet very real, sexual violence and abuses of power lurking beneath the civilized veneer of the dominant. This is all part and parcel of what Zegura terms Marguerite’s “truth project,” her intention stated in the Prologue to offer up true accounts based on lived experience, rather than artful inventions of the learned class. The text thereby becomes a subversive exploration of “otherness” that, instead of offering a unified didactic message to its reader, contests established truths and explodes notions of textual exemplarity.

With her thorough review of relevant scholarship, her deep understanding of the literary, historical, and political landscape of Renaissance France, and her fresh interpretive lens based on visual metaphors, Elizabeth Chesney Zegura has written an extraordinarily worthwhile volume that expands our understanding of the Heptaméron in fascinating new directions.