The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France: Women Writ, Women Writing by Domna C. Stanton (review)

The title of this book, The Dynamics of Gender, provides an immediate clue to the theoretical orientation of the model of gender proposed by Domna C. Stanton. Stanton’s feminist close reading of writing by and about women in seventeenth-century France draws on the work of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault to emphasise the unstable nature of gender as a relational, historical category. A key issue for both Butler and Stanton is the capacity of agents to resist normative gender frameworks. According to Stanton, Butler situates agency within ‘the apparatus’ (p. 1) of gender, suggesting that the processes that produce the categories of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ simultaneously create ambiguities and inconsistencies that gendered subjects can use to contest gender norms. Stanton’s dynamic theory of gender interprets gender norms as ‘a normative repertory of [coexisting and conflicting] types’ (p. 4) that are enacted by historical actors who conform to, negotiate, or resist the gender scripts available to them. She applies this theory to six case studies that examine the construction of women in texts by male and female writers.

The book is divided into two parts, each of which comprises three chapters focused on a key text, or, in the case of Chapter 3, two counter-discursive texts. Part I, ‘Women Writ’, analyses representations of women in texts by male writers including Racine, Fénelon, and Poullain de la Barre. Part II, ‘Women Writing’, examines representations of women by three female writers: La Guette, Sévigné, and La Fayette. Stanton’s aim is to identify ‘signs of conformity and of resistance to normative gender scripts and the tensions that their inscribed negotiations produce’ (p. 23). To this end, each of the case studies in Part I begins with a discussion of modern critical theory before moving to a contextual, historical close reading of the key text. Chapter 1 uses the critical trope of ‘the classical body’ to interrogate Mikhail Bakhtin’s reading of an anonymous 1622 satire of women’s talk at a lying-in. The ‘classical’ Racine is questioned by Chapter 2’s reading of the relationship between political order and the control of women in his 1674 tragedy Iphigénie en Aulide. Chapter 3 turns to Foucault’s notion of ‘reverse’ or ‘counter’ discourse to evaluate the pedagogical and feminist legacy of Poullain’s 1674 radical De l’éducation des dames and Fénelon’s 1687 reactionary De l’éducation des filles in the context of seventeenth-century anxieties about female knowledge.

In Part II, Stanton’s focus shifts from canonical genres dominated by male writers – satire, tragedy, and treatises – to modern genres associated with female writers – memoir, letter-writing, and fiction. The style of these chapters also shifts, with Stanton’s voice becoming clearer and more direct in her reading of the conflicting female selves constructed by La Guette’s defence of female life-writing, Sévigné’s assertion of maternal love, and La Fayette’s ironic narratorial ambiguity. These three chapters, unlike the chapters in Part I, are not organised chronologically: Chapter 4 analyses La Guette’s 1681 memoir, Chapter 5 examines Sévigné’s letters to her daughter, which date from the early 1670s to the 1690s, and Chapter 6 considers La Fayette’s 1678 novel La Princesse de Montpensier.

In her Afterword, Stanton suggests that some of the negative depictions of women she identifies in the male-authored texts in Part I are resisted by the female-authored texts in Part II. For example, representations of mother love in Chapters 4 and 5 run counter to the negative and ambivalent depictions of mothers in Chapters 1 and 3. But this comparison is not straightforward, as Stanton notes that La Guette’s moralising discourse in Chapter 4 includes ‘virtually misogynistic attitudes toward daughters’ (p. 209).

Stanton’s critical approach to...