L’Écriture de Soi : Lettres et Récits Autobiographiques des Religieuses de Port-Royal : Angélique et Agnès Arnauld, Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d’Andilly, Jacqueline Pascal by Agnès Cousson (review)

This publication of a doctoral thesis provides a thorough investigation of correspondence and other writings by the four nuns of the title. Cousson addresses questions concerning the relationship between “death to self” and the effusive epistolary and narrative production of the convent during the lifetimes of these women. After overviewing key concepts concerning human nature and the appropriate spiritual response to humanity’s natural instincts, the author presents several ways in which the letters under consideration either fall into line with the monastery’s prohibition against self-expression or challenge the notion that true spirituality results in the silence of the mature convert.

The first section of the book establishes the religious context of silence and self-mortification that dominates life at Port-Royal. Cousson concludes that Port-Royal prefers the unspoken language of the heart to human dialogue because the former is closer to how God speaks and effaces the individual’s voice in favor of the divine (124). She then posits that the nuns, required to be silent, seek out other opportunities to express their individuality. The letters they write provide the point of departure for the investigation of this thesis. The missives highlight the struggle between wanting to erase their self and remaining connected to one’s environment. Cousson organizes her analysis according to various kinds of attachment with which the nuns struggled. Among other connections, family and friendships represent “[…] une influence des sentiments humains sur les sentiments religieux” (207). These relationships demonstrate for Cousson the distance to which the women still had to go to reach the “vide intérieur” they claimed to be seeking and to which Port-Royal called them. In the next part of the thesis, Cousson maintains that letter writing itself encourages and maintains the individuality of the writer.

As the letters Cousson considers transform into a form of journaux intimes, greater emphasis is placed on the composer of the letter than the recipient. This highlights the epistolary genre’s capability to allow the moi to show itself despite prohibitions and declarations to the contrary. The act of writing itself allowed the women to unload feelings that imposed silence endeavored to restrict.

Considering the antithèse, Cousson proceeds to argue that such missives did not exclusively promote the self in every instance. Instead, the letter writers also used their texts to make themselves better and provoke faith by transforming the moi and filling the heart with God (362). This section of the book delves into particular syntactic, stylistic and rhetorical tools used to accomplish this goal. The notion that the letters do not always promote the individual writer is taken up again in the fourth division of the book where the author argues that the epistles also contributed to the common defense, identity and memory of Port-Royal itself when it was under attack in the latter part of the seventeenth century. In addition to letters, this section presents the récits of some sisters as evidence that the nuns “[…] pratiquent une écriture de la lutte. Elles mettent au profit le pouvoir de création et de destruction du langage à des fins spirituelles et communautaires” (563).

In the appendix, some facsimile images of letters from the correspondents are not as useful as the analysis in the main body. Though rarely provocative or groundbreaking, Cousson’s arguments are well developed with plenty of textual evidence to support the claims. For those interested in questions of religious writing and the development of the self in early modern France, this volume provides an introductory survey of some of the important connections between the two areas in the seventeenth century.