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COPYRIGHT 2002 Adam Mickiewicz University Press
ABSTRACT
Using the example of the l4th century household book Le menagier de Paris written by an old man for his teenaged wife, this essay explores how the desires of late-medieval women might have been articulated, manipulated and created by the paradigms they read about in popular conduct/courtesy/advice books, manuals usually written by men for an audience of women. I probe what indoctrination the author/narrator provides for the young wife's moral and domestic life in his bourgeous medieval Parisian household, what anecdotes about women are imbedded in the course of the narrative for her edification, and why it all matters for the medieval audience. The essay demonstrates how what women are to desire in order to be desirable to men is shaped in Le menagier. Manners, morals, and housekeeping details are equated and integrated in this book in complex ways. I want to interrogate aspects of the sort of cultural work a text such as Le menagier might perform. What are the consequences for medieval women (and modem women ), for medieval men, for medieval literary expressions, for the depictions of gender relations -- of an authorized conduct for women, created by men?
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"Was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?"
(MILL: 9)
"Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men except the most brutish, desire to have in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave, but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favorite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds..."
(MILL: 12)
"In the present day, power holds a smoother language, and whomsoever it oppresses, always pretends to do so for their own good."
(MILL: 41)
"... they [techniques of discipline] are a series of mechanisms for unbalancing power relations definitively and everywhere; hence the persistence in regarding them as the humble, but concrete form of every morality, whereas they are a set of physico-political techniques."
(Michel Foucault 1995: 223)
This essay explores how the desires of late-medieval women might have been manipulated and constructed by the paradigms articulated for them in popular conduct/courtesy/advice books, manuals usually written by men for an audience of women. (1) One such conduct book, titled in its French edition Le menagier de Paris, known in its only English version inexactly as The goodman of Paris, but more correctly translated as The book of housekeeping of Paris, is a large household compendium purportedly compiled between 1392-94 by a well-connected 60-ish Frenchman of means, an official, but not an aristocrat, for the edification of his 15 year-old wife. It comprises an instruction manual on the duties and qualities of a good wife of her station in life. Whether or not we have here a fictionalized narration of a literary author, or a sincere didactic work from an actual husband (and we can't know), Le menagier was read and copied by a sizeable late-medieval audience. I hope to point out what woman's desire was educated to be in this bourgeois Parisian book, and concomitantly what men were led to desire in women, by investigating the conduct such a book as Le menagier holds up for societal approval and the manner in which the author expresses his instructions. The discourse of the book shapes what women should desire in order to be desirable to men. I want to probe the indoctrination the narrator provides for the moral and domestic life in his household, what anecdotes about women are imbedded in the course of the narrative for the instruction of women, and what the work's literary design tells us about the narrative voice and its author and audience. Fitting any discussion of this huge dirigible of a book into the small space of this paper is problematic at best, and will necessitate providing only a partial reading of a work that deserves much more analysis. The education of a medieval wife in this book is reified as management and surveillance. She, as well as those around her, must interiorize and participate in this sur veillance. The dire sentiments of Mill and Foucault in my epigraph indicate that while techniques for the socialization of the wife in Le menagier are inscribed of course in the book's own medieval disposatif (Foucault's term for the "grid of intelligibility" the nexus of social, cultural and historical practices, both discursive and non-discursive), these techniques are recognized in other eras as having the same consequences for women.
"Educating" women to fill a certain role in medieval culture, educating them for capitalism, for finding their sphere in the private, in the home; educating them for chastity, and compliance above all, delineates either the avowed purpose or the subtext of such books as Le menagier. These conduct works are legion. Vital to understanding popular literature about women and their role in medieval society, in the main such texts are under-researched by scholars, and unavailable in student editions. Medieval women and men indeed read and were read to from these books. They ordered them from booksellers; they commissioned manuscript and later print editions and translations of them for their daughters, such as Caxton's 15th c. Book of the Knight of the Tower (Caxton 1971). Nevertheless, most scholarship on conduct books remains descriptive, rather than analytic. (2) Or, as I found with Le menagier -- they might be studied as cookery books! The only copies of the book in the University of Washington Library and the only copy of the partial English translation (Eileen Power 1928) north of Berkeley, CA reside in the cookbook collection of the Natural Sciences Library. My own interest in Le menagier includes the use of the work as a kind of gloss on Chaucer's depiction of women, since Chaucer was a contemporary of the alleged Le menagier author, and uses in his Canterbury Tales many of the same exempla which Le menagier's author proffers in his manual for his young wife. Chaucer's "reading" of the story of patient Griselda, for example, has wonderful differences from the way the Le menagier author "reads" the Petrarchan tale for his wife's elucidation.
Conduct books as a genre seem to be based upon the assumption, like saints' lives or confession manuals, that men and women can be produced, changed, trained for different roles. Proper instruction is crucial to their satisfactorily assuming their places in the social system. In The ideology of conduct (1987) Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse assert that conduct books are "integral and instrumental" to the history of desire. Such works "strove to reproduce, if not always to revise, culturally approved forms of desire" (1987: 1). These books prescribe and proscribe behaviors in order to constitute an individual who was expected to re-make herself along the books' ideological lines, as the object of cultural desire. That is, as Armstrong and Tennenhouse argue, "such expressions of desire in fact construct ideology in its most basic and powerful form, namely one the culture designates as nature itself" (1987: 2). Conduct books for women, then, offer us clear examples of the means which western culture has developed to create and regulate desire. If redefining female desire revises the basis of sexual relations, then this redefinition of desire must be the basis of political power, because changes in marital and familial relations inevitably have profound effects upon the official institutions of state. The literature of female conduct, with its assumed ability to produce change in women, can also then be read as a literature about political authority, its creation and maintenance. Such books also fostered upward mobility, for bourgeois self-definition, as many of them written for upper-middle-class women seek to model the behavior of women along aristocratic lines.
Thus, however silly...
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