Constellating Bodies, Conduct, and Social Roles: The Interplay Between Language Standardization and Gender Essentialization in Early Modern France

Abstract

My dissertation argues that various efforts to standardize the French language over the period 1538-1694 influenced the essentialization of sexe, which maps onto what we term gender today. In turn, these hardening gender expectations shaped language standardization, creating an interplay between language standardization and gender essentialization. In the mid-sixteenth century, sexe was viewed as being rooted predominantly in physiological and reproductive differences between men and women. By the end of the seventeenth century, social expectations and a wider range of social roles had become key components of sexe and were seen as having a deterministic relationship to the body. Taking the Pléiade’s attempts in the sixteenth century to elevate the French vernacular to the same level as its European counterparts as a starting point, chapter one demonstrates that understandings of sexe at this stage were rooted in physiology and reproductive roles. Poets used general ideas about femininity and women’s social functions, for instance as wives, mothers, and wet nurses, to criticize aspects of language. The chapter also considers depictions of women’s bodies in blasons and the work of women poets as reinforcements of these associations between women and aspects of language portrayed negatively, a link which runs throughout the period in different manifestations of developing ideas about sexe. Chapter two turns to the Malherbian reforms of the early seventeenth century and the institutionalization of standardization efforts via the formalization of the Académie Française. Centering the presentation of Marie de Gournay in various satires as a figure who opposed Malherbe’s vision for the language and supported the work of the Académie, it demonstrates that ideas about women had become concentrated in individual, named figures characterized in terms of their (in)ability to fulfill social expectations. These figures and femininity as a concept were used to bolster arguments about language that were unrelated to ideas about women, and developed alongside the codification of the role of the male writer. Increasing literacy rates and participation in salons among women alongside the solidification of the novel as a genre associated with women’s concerns set the stage for chapter three. The reception of these social and generic shifts by male commentators and the standardization of expectations applied to women’s conduct creates an understanding of women as a collective figure, marking a shift from reproductive roles as defining sexe. Tracking the development of the term précieuse exemplifies the emergence of women as a category and the possibility of subcategories of women therein. In the conte de fée, a key genre for late seventeenth-century understandings of sexe, perfect alignment of the body, defined primarily in terms of anatomy at this point, clothing, and fixed character traits allows an individual to access idealized, sexe-based social roles. As men and women who either display or fail to display the perfect constellation of elements constituting their sexe, the characters are products of the crystallization of two distinct gender categories. Furthermore, the genre’s conventions and figures exemplify the solidification of subcategories within the two larger categories, a symptom of hardening societal expectations. Analyzing constellations of gender shaped by shifting understandings of the body, social roles, and conduct decenters the importance of writers’ own gender and concerns. This move distinguishes my work from prevailing approaches to women writers in Early Modern French Studies.