The Story of the Marquise-Marquis de Banneville (review)

The publication in 2004 of the French text Histoire de la Marquise-Marquis de Banneville and its English translation, The Story of the Marquise-Marquis de Banneville, is another worthy contribution to the MLA Series Texts and Translations that has made accessible many early modern texts for the college classroom. This text and its translation will not only be useful to scholars and students of French literature, but will appeal as well to those in gender studies and fairy-tale studies.

In this text the hero’s mother dresses him as a girl from birth on, to spare him the dangers of war, which took her husband from her. Cross-dressing in fairy tales usually takes the form of a woman donning man’s clothing in order to go to war, as in Mme d’Aulnoy’s “Belle-Belle, ou le chevalier Fortuné,” as well as in Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier’s own “Marmoisan, ou l’Innocente Tromperie.” While few, if any, examples of male cross-dressing occur in the genre of the classic tale, the period’s most famous example of male cross-dressing in literature occurs in Honoré d’Urfé’s early seventeenth-century novel, L’Astrée. Generally speaking, cross-dressing in seventeenth-century literature was a means to achieve deeds that were unattainable in one’s original gender, or to transgress the limits of one’s gender role. This work underlines the interest that seventeenth-century writers such as Perrault and Lhéritier, among others, had in having their characters strive in disguise, be it through metamorphosis, in the case of many fairy tales, or cross-dressing, as is the case here.

The solid twenty-page introduction by Joan DeJean helps the reader situate the work in its historical framework as well as its genetic one, which to this day remains ambiguous, despite the meticulous research that has been carried out by literary scholars. In the 2004 version the text is attributed to three authors, François-Timoléon de Choisy, Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier, and Charles Perrault, for speculations regarding authorship are tenuous at best, as they are based solely on professional and familial relationships and coinciding dates. However, no definitive evidence regarding authorship can be submitted at this time because of the present lack of documentation. The arguments dealing with the question of authorship, which compose eight pages of the introduction (thus, almost half of it), turn out to be potentially plausible but can still be put into question.

That three authors are credited in this edition is new. The text had been previously attributed, specifically in 1997 by La Pléïade editions, solely to François de Choisy, who was then famous for his cross-dressing in real life. According to previous studies on this text, and notably in a piece by Daniel Maher, “Monsieur ma femme? Le travestissement au XVIIème siècle” (in Elzbieta Grodek, ed., Écriture de la ruse, Faux Titre number 190 [Atlanta: Rodopi 2000]), this work was quasi-autobiographical. Maher does not question François de Choisy’s authorship, despite the incipit included in the La Pléïade edition, which implies a woman in the creation of the work (971). Thus, it is commendable that the 2004 version puts into question this authorship and partially attributes the text to a fairly probable collaboration that such authorship included. DeJean mentions the close collaboration between Perrault and Lhéritier in general as well as the one between Perrault and Choisy, and she insists on Lhéritier being familiar with the topic of cross-dressing, since she was, at the time, working on a tale about transvestitism, “Marmoisan.”

As to the text itself, the motif of cross-dressing (accompanied by a love story that is worthy of a fairy tale where all is well that ends well) appeals to the reader, especially since...