Widowhood, sexuality, and gender in Christine de Pizan.

Christine de Pizan's rich and varied oeuvre, as it appears in the major manuscripts whose compilation she herself supervised, involves a set of multiple subject positions, that are both essential and constitutive ("built in," as it were) with regard to the oeuvre as such.(1) There is, however, first of all, Christine's authorial subject, implicitly guaranteeing the overall coherence of each of her major single-author mss., as well as the conceptual literary entity in which all the mss. are presented, both implicitly and explicitly. Then there are the various subject positions utilized by Christine-author to construct her public persona as a professional writer within the specific historical exigencies required by the context of early fifteenth-century Paris.(2) Christine's strategies of self-representation in this public arena involved, over the course of the first fifteen years of her literary career, an innovative combination of different "institutionalized" identities, configured so as to authorize what she presents as her new female-gendered authorial voice by means of suppressing her "conventional" sexuality as a woman. At the heart of this project of historically contingent auto-mimesis is Christine's radical separation of gender from sexuality.(3) That is, she officially establishes her authority as woman author by distancing herself from any possible sexual identity as historically specific woman. Central to this strategy is Christine's "autobiographical" self-representation as widow, in which she presents herself as a "corrected" Dido who is both a mother and an author.(4) It is this provocative combination of three gendered subject positions -- virtuous widow, caring mother and female author -- that Christine uses to establish her authority within the public discursive space of the early fifteenth-century Parisian literary establishment. In this enterprise of public self-definition, the key negative element is that of the female sexual object of desire, and/or the sexually desiring female subject. For during the decade and a half following her husband's death, the period during which her literary career was definitively established (1390-1405), Christine de Pizan carefully and programatically detached her female-gendered authorial persona from the economy of sexual desire, normally associated with courtly discourse.

Thus in the first of her Cent Ballades (ca. 1395-1401) she speaks as a grieving widow, whose first-person subject matter in the collection to follow must necessarily be confined to lamentations, while her impetus to write is presented as originating in the requests of her patrons. This stance functions to distance Christine's subject position as author from the various first-person courtly voices (male as well as female) that she will utilize over the course of the collection. The central ballade (number fifty) carries yet further the detachment of Christine-author from the position of courtly desiring subject: "d'amours je n'ay tourment / joye ne dueil"(5) [I feel no torment, nor joy, nor pain from love]. In the concluding ballade (number one hundred), she speaks as a professional writer successfully completing a commission: "cent balades ay cy escriptes /... si en sont mes promesses quites / a qui m'en pria chierement" [I have written a hundred ballades and I have thus fulfilled my promise to the one who eagerly asked me to do so].(6)

In the Mutacion de Fortune (1402-03), she recounts an autobiographical fable in allegorical terms, which presents the central event of her life (affectively, legally, and literarily) as being her husband's death and her subsequent widowhood. The transformation of Christine-protagonist from wife to widow is presented as an Ovidian metamorphosis involving gender change: widowhood transforms her from a woman into a man. Both the specific Ovidian model evoked (Iphis, from Met. IX) and the actual narration of Christine-protagonist's (metaphoric) gender change are carefully de-eroticized. The prominent sexuality of the Ovidian character Iphis is simply eliminated in Christine's retelling of the story. And the diety who effects Iphis's gender change becomes in Christine's version the chaste Vesta, goddess of marriage, who thus displaces the Ovidian Isis, with her transgressive sexual connotations. Christine's narrative of her own metamorphosis at the hands of Fortune is correspondingly divested of any sexual dimension. Indeed, her transformation into a man may be seen as a gender change that does not involve a sex change, that, rather, puts the newly widowed Christine outside of the economy of sexual desire.(7)

The most public event of Christine's early literary career was the "Querelle du Roman de la Rose," which took place between 1401 and 1402. At issue in Christine's participation in this famous debate was her status as a woman writer, as a professional intellectual empowered to speak on her own female-gendered terms within the context of the 15th-century Parisian intellectual establishment. Christine makes her authority to speak in public dependent upon the gendered subject position of learned female reader and writer. The strategic separation of gender and sexuality in her self-depiction as virtuous widow is thus essential to her public discursive authority. And this authority is challenged at a particularly important point in the Querelle by one of her principle male opponents, Pierre Col. In an attempt to discredit Christine's status as his discursive equal (a status implicit in the very fact that he is reponding to her in this public forum), Pierre Col casts her, hypothetically speaking, in the position of object of desire, thus (re-)placing her into the economy of courtly sexuality. This move occurs in a long and public letter that Pierre Col writes to Christine during the summer of 1402. As part of his discussion of a disputed passage from Jean de Meun's Rose (the moral implications of the character Raison's statement that "Mieulx vault decepvoir que deceus estre," corresponding to Rose, vv. 4369-70), Pierre proposes the following hypothetical example: "En oultre je dy qu'il me vaulroit mieux -- c'est a dire qu'il me greveroit moins -- faire samblant de toy amer pour moy aasier charnelement de ton corps qu'il ne feroit pour celle meisme fin que "en fuisse fol amoureux, pour quoy j'en perdisse mon estude, [much less than] sans, temps, chastel, corps, ame, los [much greater than] (comme dit est)" (ed. Hicks, p. 99) [Furthermore, I say it would not be better, that is, that it would harm me less to pretend to love you in order to sexually enjoy your body than it would if, for this same purpose, I were truly a foolish lover, for in that state I should lose my learning, "sense, time, castle, body, soul, reputation," as he [ = Jean de Meun] said. (102)].(8)

In her reply to ...