(Re)constructing gender: Cross-dressing in seventeenth-century French literature.

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes cross-dressing as a means through which texts (re)construct masculinity and femininity. The inversion of roles involved in cross-dressing calls into question the parameters of gender identity in specific historical contexts and may eventually produce new understandings of man and woman. At the same time, the texts under study in this dissertation reveal tensions between the rejection of essentialist models of gender difference, on the one hand, and their reinscription, on the other. Such tensions point to societal conflicts at cultural and political levels. Previous studies have focused on cross-dressing in seventeenth-century French literature solely as an effect of Baroque esthetics or as a dramatic theme and narrative device. This body of work has ignored cross-dressing as a site where competing understandings of gender are foregrounded and new notions are tested. Moreover, the majority of research on this topic centers on the theatre, and thus privileges almost exclusively the work of male authors. It overlooks the instances of cross-dressing in prose fiction by women. My study examines the representation of cross-dressing in one play (Corneille's Clitandre) and three novels (d'Urfe's L'Astree, Villedieu's Memoires de la vie d'Henriette-Sylvie de Moliere, and L'Heritier's L'Amazone francoise), two of them by women. The introduction to this dissertation evaluates the significance of the querelle des femmes, the reign of two female regents, and the Fronde in accounting for the prevalence of cross-dressing, and argues that the historical circumstances both signalled and produced ambivalence in seventeenth-century gender ideology. Each of the four chapters consists of a close reading of a symptomatic text informed by contemporary gender theory as well as research of a transvestism in the early modern period. My study shows that the inversion of gender roles entails a revision of, and hence a potential threat to, the normal hierarchy that defined relations of power between men and women in seventeenth-century France. It concludes, however, that the containment of the transvestite's threat is more pronounced in texts by male authors than in those by women, for whom the female transvestite could symbolize the dream of female autonomy in an androcentric textual and social world.