Libidinal Economy and Gender Trouble in Marivaux's La Fausse Suivante

In their edition of Marivaux's play La Fausse Suivante (1724), Henri Coulet and Michel Gilot categorically deny the relevance of a discourse on gender and sex to the transvestite protagonist, a young woman who pretends to be a man in order to befriend her intended husband and test his character. The fiancé turns out to be a despicable petit-maître and a prospective wife abuser, but in the course of a complicated and twisted plot, the heroine in drag aggressively courts a countess, her rival, and promises to marry her. The countess, a coquette, falls in love, only to discover that she has been the victim of a cruel mystification. Coulet and Gilot are certain that there are in this play, or in any other play by Marivaux, no allusions to "des amours contre nature." ¹ "Le déguisement du sexe . . . est un poncif romanesque et théâtral, dont Marivaux ne songe pas à se servir pour explorer les aberrations du désir." ² Maybe so. But the cliché is interesting, not the least so because it is a cliché.

From the early seventeenth century onwards, the conventions of French fiction allow great latitude for men and women to play the opposite sex with unvaried success. Characters glide from one gender to the other with little trouble or uncertainty. The most remarkable and notorious case is undoubtedly to be found in L'Astrée, the mother of all heroic novels, in which Céladon, the paragon of lovers, disguises himself as Alexis, a young druidess and spends half of this five thousand page novel in drag. His disguise allows him to be in the company of his beloved and temperamental Astrée without disobeying her orders. Because of a previous misunderstanding, in fact, Astrée had forever banished him from her presence. In this exquisitely scholastic novel, "Astrée ne lui a pas défendu d'être Céladon, mais seulement de lui faire voir ce Céladon": hence Céladon will feel entitled to be himself with her, but will show himself under an assumed identity. ³ Cross-dressing, with its overtones of androgyny, might be part and parcel of the pastoral genre, which takes its inspiration from Plato's Symposium and from the tradition of homosexuality in Greek and Roman pastoral poetry; however, it is by no means limited to the pastoral. ⁴ In Jean Regnault de Segrais's tragic novella Eugénie (Les Nouvelles françaises, 1656), the very young, but unimpeachably masculine count of Arenberg, a German soldier to boot, turns himself into a demoiselle Eugénie and signs up for the job of lady-in-waiting to the countess d'Almont, the wife of his best friend, with whom he has fallen desperately in love. Well before Dustin Hoffman's Tootsie, Eugénie learns how annoying it can be to be stuck in the role of confidante and girlfriend to one's love object. In book 4 of Gil Blas, Aurore de Guzman, who is, just like Marivaux's heroine, a young woman in charge of her fortune and her actions, borrows the identity of the chevalier Félix de Mendoce so as to get to know better the libertine Don Louis Pacheco whom she finds irresistible and hopes to marry. As cunning and unscrupulous as Marivaux's character, and very quick at changing her clothes, Aurore passes back and forth from being Don Félix to being herself, gets rid of her rivals, seduces the libertine and, after the obligatory confession, marries him. Far from suffering a shock, Don Louis is delighted to discover that he is getting married to his former good friend Félix.

Transvestitism in fiction does not seem to involve a radical questioning of gender identity, but is perfectly compatible with conventional amorous relations. Gender crossing is often the ultimate proof of a rigorously heterosexual love, a cunning device or a desperate move. Men...