The Pen/is Mightier Speech and Writing in Representations of Préciosité

Women In French Studies The Pen/is Mightier Speech and Writing in Representations ofPréciosité Any analysis oí préciosité, the Parisian salon movement which reached its peak in the 1650s and early 1660s, is impeded by a number of factors. The critic is necessarily limited to written records of what was described by contemporaries as being primarily a spoken phenomenon. In addition, although one of the salient features oípréciosité was the role played by women, nearly all of its chroniclers are men; as a result, differences between the ruelle, seen as a feminine space, and masculine culture tend to be exaggerated. However, the greatest source of distortion comes from the fact that préciosité has the dubious distinction ofbeing defined primarily by satirists: the best-known contemporary accounts ofpréciosité are satires. In these accounts, it is possible to trace a systematic replacement of speech by women with satirical writing by men. Molière's Précieuses ridicules (1659), as the best-known artistic text focused on préciosité, has been most influential in effecting this substitution in the public mind. But the play, as writing intended for speech, reveals the result of this distortion without showing the mechanism by which the substitution is carried out. However, an analysis of two other accounts ofpréciosité, the Abbé de Pure's novel La Pretieuse ou Le mystère des ruelles (1656-8) and Antoine Badeau de Somaize's 1661 Grand Dictionnaire des Précieuses , reveals the mechanism of this distortion even on thematic and structural levels. In both works, speech is associated with women and writing with men. In this gendering of spoken and written language, one can discern a pattern of systematic devaluing of women's speech, accompanied by its replacement by men's writing; these factors reflect historical representations ofpréciosité. Both books are problematic in and of themselves; there is considerable critical disagreement concerning the degree of satire contained in each. In the case of Pure, the ambiguity stems primarily from inconsistencies in the text. Over the novel's four parts and seven hundred fifty pages, not only does Pure alternate lavish praise of the Précieuses with barbed remarks, he also appears to change his definition of préciosité midway through the novel. Characters described as Précieuse in Book One are contrasted with a Précieuse in Book 111 Women In French Studies Four. Somaize, fortunately, is more consistent. His Dictionnaire contains the descriptions (portraits) of more than two hundred Précieuses and their male counterparts, alphabetized according to the pseudonyms he has given them. The portraits are interspersed with termes précieux and their definitions. The ambiguity in Somaize's case comes less from the Dictionnaire itself than from the fact that it is presented as a re-edition of the 1660 Dictionnaire, which he explicitly claims to have compiled for the reader's amusement. Indeed, it is the only one of Somaize's works which is not an overt satire ofpréciosité. Despite the praise of the Précieuses which both works contain, there is nonetheless evidence of satiric intent: some of Somaize's portraits are hardly flattering, and Pure, in the preface to Book Four, describes his novel as a satire: "Je n'ay attaqué ... Ia PRETIEUSE, que par une juste indignation, et par un ressentiment légitime" (IV: 195). Any praise of Précieuses by either Somaize or Pure must be considered in this light. The gendering of speech and writing, with the accompanying view that writing is best left to men, is not only implicit throughout La Pretieuse, it is explicitly stated early on in the novel: "l'art de dire est ce semble dans son climat dans la bouche d'une personne de nostre Sexe; mais celuy d'escrire, il faut le laisser aux hommes, sans leur porter envie, et sans le vouloir imiter" (I: 25). This observation is placed in the mouth of a female character (Eulalie, whose name means bavarde); the restriction is thus depicted as self-imposed. Whereas elsewhere in the novel Pure's feminine characters present themselves as victims of their circumscribed social role, writing is not an activity denied women, but one...