Early Modern Women's Mobility in French Women's Theater

This essay argues that studying female characters' mobility offers insights on the development of "the woman question" (querelle des femmes). Since the fifteenth century, intellectuals, moralists, and theologians had debated women's influence, societal roles, education, intellect, sexual politics, and work. Although most of the early contributors to the debate were male, female authors increasingly contested claims about women's limitations.¹ During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French women playwrights, including Madame de Maintenon, Catherine Durand, Marie-Anne Barbier, and Madame de Staal-Delaunay, contributed to the debate through their female protagonists' mobility, or access to (and voice within) the public sphere. Their works portray some of the limitations on and opportunities afforded to female protagonists, and thus also to real women who ventured outside of their prescribed space.²

I locate my discussion of mobility within the recent scholarly literature on early modern women's travel and agency. For instance, Perry Gethner analyzes female characters' levels of agency in early modern French plays.³ Patricia Akhimie and Bernadette Andrea, meanwhile, make a similar distinction among travelers (self-willed versus coercive) in early modern England.⁴ I add another analytical dimension: oppressive versus agentive (i.e., having agency) outcomes for lead female characters. Put in its simplest form, does a female character's mobility lead to an oppressive or agentive outcome? Though agentive and oppressive outcomes generally reflect the voluntary and involuntary aspects of mobility, respectively, I argue that all outcomes (the results of both voluntary and involuntary mobility) allow female playwrights to make astute observations concerning gender issues, especially regarding women's authority within the realm of marriage and courtship.⁵

As Karen Offen has noted, France, in particular, is a good case, for it "provides a consistent and unusually rich record of women playing highly visible roles in public life, both at court and beyond."⁶ Indeed, recent studies highlight the influence that women writers had on the public sphere in early modern France.⁷ I add to this body of scholarship by arguing that French women playwrights drew attention to differences in gender expectations through their female characters' mobility and its effect on those characters' lives.

Defining Mobility in French Women's Theater

Early modern women traveled regularly despite a general proscription on women's movement outside of the domestic space.⁸ In moving about, these travelers escaped the private sphere and/or challenged social norms in their new environments.⁹ In French theater, genre played an important role in portrayals of travel, as tragedies had to observe the classical Aristotelian unities that required the characters to remain in one physical location to ensure that the action in a tragedy should occur over a period of no more than twenty-four hours. Tragicomedies and other minor genres, such as those under investigation here, relaxed the rules, allowing women playwrights the possibility of characters' mobility.¹⁰

When using the term mobility in the context of early modern French theater, I refer broadly to moving beyond the prescribed space. Two types of mobile women emerge in early modern French theater. First, some characters escape the confines of the home (or convent) by physically traveling elsewhere. In moving from one place to another, they break from the domestic space that patriarchal traditions reserved for women. Second, some characters go beyond expected behavior by breaking rules of decorum. Expected to adhere to certain gender expectations (e.g., chastity—meaning preserving their virginity or remaining sexually faithful to their husbands—and modesty), these women exercise mobility by transgressing patriarchal norms.¹¹ Thus, a "mobile" woman could literally move out of the home or she could symbolically break the rules of comportment. In both cases, she is moving beyond the prescribed space.

In what follows, I examine plays written by four French female writers. Maintenon's "Qui se fait brebis, le loup la mange" [She who makes herself a sheep will be eaten by the wolf] and Durand's "Pour un plaisir, mille douleurs" [For one tryst, a thousand woes] emphasize the limitations patriarchy placed upon women. In discussing...