Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in Seventeenth-Century France (review)

Paradoxically – and despite the ample bibliography of Seifert's study – the very centrality of masculinity within patriarchal culture means that it remains strangely marginalised as a topic of critical discussion, and perhaps particularly so in seventeenth-century studies. As Seifert argues, patriarchal cultures typically present masculinity as 'a self-evident, unmarked, and universal category' (p. 1) – a notion sadly and ironically echoed by various modes of feminist thought that risk 'reducing the complexity and variability of masculinity to an amorphous and monolithic patriarchy' (p. 4). Accordingly, Seifert's welcome and important study intelligently explores a range of different 'masculinities' (p. 6) within various seventeenth-century French discourses. After a theoretically astute introduction, Seifert's book falls into two parts. The first, 'Civilizing the Margins', is primarily concerned with the complex relationships between masculinity and social codes of civility. Although, as Seifert demonstrates, dominant models of masculine honnêteté derive as much from heterosocial interaction with women as from male exemplars, the mutual imbrication of masculinity and femininity within salon and court culture could be a source of great theoretical and practical anxiety. Accordingly, throughout these chapters Seifert traces the fraught relationship between honnête masculinity and the various modes of femininity, effeminacy, homo-and heterosociality against which it had to defend and define itself. As Seifert demonstrates, seventeenth-century masculinity is flexible enough to take on various forms; the galanterie of Voiture, the honnête masculinity of Méré and the 'tender masculinity' propounded by Mademoiselle de Scudéry all attempt to appropriate modes of restraint or delicacy without lapsing into effeminacy or other debased forms of masculinity. In the second part, 'Sexuality and the Body at the Margins', Seifert turns his focus directly onto two phenomena that have haunted, subtly but tenaciously, the margins of the earlier chapters: homosexuality and cross-dressing. Chapter Five follows the period's attitudes towards male homosexuality backwards, through three distinct stages – from satires of sodomites under Louis XIV, via the mid-century poetry of Boisrobert, to the trial of Théophile de Viau. The final chapter explores gender transgression through the curious and complex figure of the abbé de Choisy. Although, almost inevitably, the question of masculinity per se takes something of a back seat in these chapters, the analyses they offer are subtle and fascinating. One particular strength of this study is Seifert's skilful weaving between modern and early-modern attitudes towards masculinity, neither reducing one to the other nor casting them as mutually exclusive, but rather showing their mutual illumination. Seifert argues, for example, that Choisy's cross-dressing can best be understood in terms of the modern category of 'transgender' – a notion that helps to reinstate the importance of the sexed body that is often occluded by post-structuralist notions of gender as performance. Even though this final chapter is slightly more tentative and less convincing than the others – and although Seifert disappointingly misapplies to Choisy a description of another cross-dressing priest, the abbé d'Entragues (p. 221) – these minor quibbles cannot distract from the importance of both Seifert's study in itself and the rich theoretical field that it opens up.