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Journal of the History of Sexuality 12.2 (2003) 320-323



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The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France. By JOAN DEJEAN. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 204. $45.00 (cloth); $18.00 (paper).

As she herself explains at the end of her critical introduction, Joan DeJean tells us "three stories" about crucial moments in the formation of early modern French literary culture. These narratives, all of which concern notorious literary texts and their accompanying legal proceedings, are meant to illuminate the connected construction of two soon-to-be-dominant cultural ideas: the practice of censorship and the newly emerging notion of the obscene.

Relying on Foucauldian models of the history of sexuality, DeJean introduces her project with a careful, thorough examination of the meaning of the word "obscene" over time. Meaning "inauspicious, ill-omened, sinister" in the original Latin, the word obscenus functioned, according to DeJean, above all as a boundary marker, signaling the frontier between levels of social acceptability and announcing the limit of access (i.e., men only were able to "enjoy" the obscene) rather than passing a judgment, be it legal, moral, or religious. Subject to all manner of shifting significations from the era of ancient Rome to their appearance in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French and English lexicons, notions of the obscene reemerged with a vengeance at just the point when print culture became powerful enough to begin reaching large audiences. As DeJean points out, "[F]or obscenity to be a problem, it must be public" (7).

According to DeJean, obscenity's search for its own identity in early modern France began during the first half of the seventeenth century (21), [End Page 320] and no legal/literary event suggests the complex nature of this quest more powerfully than the trial of the poet Theophile de Viau. This chapter, which is arguably the most fascinating of the three, outlines the fortunes of Theophile, who was a converted Protestant and whose sonnet was included without his permission in Le Parnasse des poètes satyriques, a collection of "bawdy" poems that used an overwhelming number of the following dirty words: "foutre" (fuck), "vit" (cock), and "con" (cunt). These words were for the most part never written out but were abbreviated with different types of punctuation inserted as the visual cue for the missing letter.

The appearance in 1622 of this volume of scandalous poems coincided with concerns about what the French crown saw as a Protestant Menace, along with the fear that such "bawdy" works—reserved originally for aristocratic male circles—would become accessible to other, lower-status readers. As a result of these paradigm shifts, Theophile was singled out for having composed a poem that culminates with a whimsical plan to avoid venereal disease by switching from vaginal to purely anal intercourse (a choice that resonates with sad irony for readers in the twenty-first century). This poem and its author would become ensnared in radical epistemological changes as emerging branches of secular and religious authority struggled with each other to define and enlarge their own boundaries.

Escaping the death sentence that the Parisian Parliament handed down, Theophile was taken to task by a Jesuit priest, primarily because of the poem's reference to sodomy. He was eventually rearrested, imprisoned, and successfully prosecuted. "Theophile," DeJean tells us, "became the first author ever to have been prosecuted for naming in his work male genitalia" (53). The curious, now long-standing connection between four-letter words and obscenity is made during the course of these proceedings, according to the author. Obscenity as we know it began to take on its modern meaning in the context of a legal proceeding that put the writer himself on trial. Obscenity also, DeJean suggests, was originally linked to policing the domains of male sexuality.

The cultural situation surrounding the publication of L'Ecole de filles in the middle of the seventeenth century marked the successful move of obscene literature into bourgeois and feminine domains, as female genitalia...

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