Erotica and women in early modern France: Madeleine de l'Aubespine's queer poems.(Critical essay)

WHAT CAN WE KNOW ABOUT AN early modern woman's sexuality? Consider these lines by Madeleine de l'Aubespine (1546-96):

 
    "Riddle" 
 
    As the sweetest diversion that I could ever find, 
    Frequently, after dinner, for fear of becoming weary, 
    I take the neck in hand, I touch it and I stroke, 
    Till it's in such a state as to give me delight. 
 
    I fall upon my bed and, without letting go, 
    I grasp it in my arms, I press it to my breast, 
    And moving hard and fast, all ravished with pleasure, 
    Amidst a thousand joys I fulfill my desire. 
 
    If it sometimes unfortunately happens to slacken, 
    I stroke it with my hand, and right away I strive 
    To enjoy the delight of such a tender touch. 
 
    Thus, my beloved, so long as I pull on his sinew, 
    Contents and pleases me. Then away from me, softly, 
    Tired and not sated, I finally withdraw it. 
    Of a Lute. (1) 

This sonnet from a manuscript album that also includes verses by the most read French poets of the period, Pierre de Ronsard, Philippe Desportes, Jean-Antoine de Baif, and Clement Marot, was intended for circulation in a literary salon. While it draws on personal sexual fantasies and self-description of sexual practice, it functions within multiple frames of literary and social reference.

L'Aubespine's place was at the French court. By birth and marriage she was part of the elite of servants to the crown. Her brother Claude de l'Aubespine was brought up with the king, Charles IX, and was one of his "intimates." (2) Her father and uncle were powerful statesmen, and her husband, Nicolas de Neufville, sieur de Villeroy, was one of the most important royal ministers of the late sixteenth century, having served four kings (Charles IX, Henry III, Henry IV, and Louis XIII). (3) Late-sixteenth-century courtly milieu was given to expressions of frank eroticism, unlike other milieux at the time where women poets belabored the topic of "feminine modesty." (4) The rhetorical figure that inspired the poem is the riddle--by definition, a figure that suggests an obscene meaning but has an asexual solution; here, the narrator is playing the lute. (5)

In the middle of the sixteenth century Thomas Wilson said in The Arte of Rhetorike: "Every Oratour, should earnestly labour to file his tongue, that his woordes maie slide with ease, and that in his deliverance he maie have suche grace, as the sound of a Lute, or any suche instrument doth give." (6) Here, not the sound of the lute but the extended image of lute playing is the "deliverance"--the method of delivery--through which a description of sexual acts "maie slide with ease," that is, be witty and titillating. Sexual riddles are associated in early modern arts of rhetoric with the conventions of chastity, and their examples usually show them as a way for men to make women laugh while dodging bienseances, the constraints of propriety. For Henry Peachum, "there be three causes" to use periphrasis: "necessitie" (absence of a proper term), "perspicuitie" or "lightness" ("desire of copie and facilitie"), and "chastitie" or "desire to shunne obscenitie and naked telling of bashful matters, which is a part of modestie, much to be comended." (7) Peachum says of a related figure, antanaclasis (the use of one word with two different meanings), that "it moveth many times a most pleasant kind of civile mirth, which is called of the Latines Facetiae, or Urbanitas."

The point of sexual jokes is to make the audience think about sex, but their function (flirting, verbal rape, homosocial bonding between men at the expense of women) depends on power positions inscribed in the conditions of their delivery. A sexual riddle creates a logical impasse ("honi soit qui mal y pense"--"shamed be he/she who thinks evil of it") that prevents a chaste woman from silencing the riddler even though she feels harassed (a pure mind would not know that the riddle has an obscene answer). Similarly, Sigmund Freud defined a sexual joke as an act of "sexual aggression," either a way for the speaker to expose himself to the object of his lust or a hostile exposure of another (two men sharing a laugh about a woman). Jokes "evade restrictions and open sources of pleasure that have become unavailable" to satisfy these two drives, lust and hostility. The lust-driven jokes ask the addressee to "imagine the part of the body or the procedure in question and show her that the assailant is himself imagining it." In finding the joke objectionable the addressee testifies to her own arousal. The joke between men releases the hostility caused by repression, a woman's inhibition of a man's libido. (8)

L'Aubespine manipulated the genre of sexual jokes for her own woman-centered ends by appropriating a masculine prerogative--since the joke tellers were usually men--and presenting a sexually active female agent. Conversely, some of her sexual riddles inscribe the stereotype that what is male is active and what is female is passive. (9) There exists a strong tradition of women appropriating erotic genres for women-centered purposes that are at odds with the genre's prevalent function. A recent parallel is Anna Biller's film Viva (2006), a parody of sexploitation movies from the late sixties and early seventies. While Biller (not only the director but also an actor who strips in the movie) set out to reappropriate the genre and create a movie that would correspond to women's erotic fantasies, she herself became the object of male erotic fantasies, for instance, in the mainstream press that often conflates her with her onscreen persona. (10) Yet if a woman's appropriation of a male-centered erotic genre can always be reappropriated, it is never completely reabsorbed. L'Aubespine's poem circulated, among others, in a popular early modern collection of erotica, Le cabinet satyrique (The Satyric Closet). (11) Its inclusion there ensured the circulation of a woman's rewriting of a genre within the very context that showcased the masculine version, allowing for further modulations when, in turn, the Cabinet was read by other women. By "women" I mean the aristocrats whose writings are used here to reconstruct their history of sexuality; it is a fragmentary reconstruction. It is also worth noting that sexual agency, legal autonomy, and political power were privileges of aristocratic women that sharply distinguished them from others; it has been observed that Mme de Sevigne (1626-96), author and patron of one of the great literary salons of her day, had a seat in the regional French parliament of Brittany by virtue of being a landowner, while her modern female compatriots, citizens of the French Republic, did not obtain even the right to vote until 1945.