Who was Jeanne Flore?: Subversion and Silence in Les contes amoureux par madame Jeanne Flore

WOMEN IN FRENCH STUDIES Who was Jeanne Flore? Subversion and Silence in Les contes amoureuxpar madame Jeanne Flore It is interesting to imagine the reception of Jeanne Flore's Contes amoureux in late 1530s Lyon. This curious work, recently rediscovered and edited in the 1980s, is a collection of tales about service to love and the constraints of marriage. Each conte is told by a different female character. There are seven contes, plus an opening epistle and concluding poem from Jeanne Flore. The purpose of the contes is to refute the unacceptable attitude of madame Cebille toward love; however, her story is absent from the text. Scholars cannot say whether Cebille's story is truly missing, or if it was ever written. Yet, the true mystery of the Contes amoureux lies in the question of its authorship. Who was Jeanne Flore? No one has been able to confirm her identity or her existence. Was she an obscure writer whose memory has been erased by time? Did readers in the late 1530s wonder, as we do, who Jeanne Flore was, if it was a pseudonym for some other woman, or for some man, or for a group of men? Or, were the contes a kind of "roman à clé," where the names of the various narratrices were code names for real people in Lyon? It is also possible that every reader of the Contes amoureux in Lyon knew who the writer or the writers were, and that the joke is on us—twentieth-century readers obsessed with authorship? While the question of the authorship of the Contes amoureux may be unsolvable as yet, it is still a significant factor in any reading or interpretation of the Contes. In the introduction to the 1980 edition arranged by Ie Centre Lyonnais d'Étude de l'Humanisme (CLEH) directed by Gabriel Perouse, I was struck by the pervading problematic of the unknown authorship. In the section on feminism, Madeleine Lazard tries to sketch a feminist reading of the contes, but in order to do so, she must assume that the author was a woman (32). Does this mean that only a female writer would be concerned with the constraints of marriage? Can a man not write a feminist text? These are questions which plague feminism today, and I fear that they are questions that would not occur to a sixteenth-century writer or reader; in other words, we may bring twentieth century concerns and questions to this text. I do not mean to suggest that we cannot do a feminist reading of the Contes amoureux. On the contrary, the text seems to invite such a reading as it is openly concerned with women and the problems of women in marriage. However, we need to find a way of reading that can account for an ambiguous author—a missing author, that may be male or female, single or multiple. We need a way of reading that will not shove ambiguity and contradiction under the rug. Julia Kristeva provides such a mode of reading in her theory of the acquisition of language, and most specifically in her theory of the semiotic. As explained in La Révolution du langage poétique (1977), the semiotic exists in WOMEN IN FRENCH STUDIES language as gaps, absences and contradictions. Although these gaps and breaks interrupt symbolic language, they are always marginal to it. Nonetheless, Kristeva identifies the margins as the focus of subversion and revolution. Therein resides the power. Therefore, a textual reading for absences, gaps, silences and contradictions is also a reading for subversion. So what has all this late twentieth-century politico-linguistic jargon have to do with Jeanne Flore and her Contes amoureux! A reading of the text through Kristeva's theory of the semiotic will necessarily mean reading the Contes through the character of Cebille, the shadowy silent woman whose missing "avant-text" is just as mysterious as our missing author. Cebille's voice is continually silenced by the other narratrices, and her story, about which we have only the basic theme, is fought down over and over again with each story. Thus, Cebille and her missing story are completely marginal to the seven stories that...