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

Domna C. Stanton’s ambitious and long-awaited book examines the workings of what she calls the “dynamics of gender” in the early modern period. Rejecting essentialist approaches, Stanton grounds her study in a “dynamic” theory of gender where gender is always shifting and impossible to define once and for all, and is therefore subject to constant renegotiations, accommodations, concessions, and resistances. Since gender is a relational construct, her study is also about men even as it focuses on women. While the Dynamics of Gender is centered on seventeenth-century French literature, Stanton’s impressive scholarly reach, exemplary methodology, and crucial questions about decoding gender in earlier periods make her work essential reading for students and scholars of the early modern period across the disciplines. Stanton’s deep engagement with contemporary critical theory and her lucid interrogation of what “reading-as-a-feminist” means — its ethical and political implications and responsibilities — confirm her well-earned place at the forefront of feminist criticism today.

Stanton endorses and masterfully deploys a methodology of historically grounded close textual analysis to reveal and complicate normative discourses on women and men as well as counter-discursive narratives. Through impeccably close readings of texts examined in interplay with other discourses and counter-discourses of the period, Stanton shows early modern texts to be extraordinary sites for reconstructing the interrogation and negotiation of the period’s unstable and contradictory gender norms. She consistently embraces the complexities of the dynamics at work in each of her chosen texts, never accepting a singular or simplified reading but instead welcoming the contradictions and tensions revealed within each text as opportunities to complicate the understanding of gender in early modern France. Indeed, it is Stanton’s insistence on analyzing discourses and counter-discourses in all their dialectical tension, rather than defaulting to traditional binary oppositions, that marks her daring critical stance.

As the book’s subtitle, “Women Writ, Women Writing,” suggests, Stanton’s study of the dynamics of gender treats, in two equal parts, both works written about women by men (the anonymous author of the 1623 Receuil général des caquets de l’accouchée, Racine, Fénelon, and Poulain de la Barre) and works written by women (La Guette, La Fayette, and Sévigné). The introduction presents a helpful overview of the major movements and themes that characterize the period’s longstanding debates about women, which she renames the querelle des femmes et des hommes. Stanton understands the authors she examines as operating within a set of constraints and limitations imposed by the rules of discourse and decorum of their historical period, yet she also investigates the ways in which they negotiate means of accommodation through both conformity and resistance. The book’s chapters span the genres of the period, examining satirical fiction, pedagogical treatises, classical tragedy, personal memoir, novella, and epistolary writing. Stanton explores texts that have received little critical attention and challenges past readings of some better-known works with carefully chosen textual evidence, drawing on contemporary critical theory to elucidate and complicate her approaches and interpretations. Butler and Foucault are key figures here, but she productively draws many other critical voices into the discussion. Stanton’s elegant writing is crafted with an obvious love for words and attention to style. Scholars of French literature in particular will appreciate her inclusion of the original French in her footnotes, as well as her improvements on existing translations that appear in square brackets within quotations.

In chapter one, “Recuperating Women and the Man Behind the Screen: (Un)classical Bodies in Les caquets de l’accouchée (1622)?,” Stanton examines a collection of texts in which a recovering melancholic man listens in on and records women’s conversations during a lying-in. Stanton shows that while the caquets tradition typically cast women’s talk as worthy only of male derision, in these texts, parallels...