Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works

206 Pages·2002·0.57 MB·English

by  Marie le Jars de Gournay

APOLOGY
FOR THE WOMAN WRITING
and other works
THE
OTHER VOICE
IN
EARLY MODERN
EUROPE
A Series Edited by Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr.
OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIES
HENRICUS CORNELIUS AGRIPPA LUCREZIA MARINELLA
Declamation on the Nobility and The Nobility and Excellence of Women,
Preeminence of the Female Sex and the Defects and Vices of Men
Edited and translated by Albert Rabil, Jr. Edited and translated by Anne Dunhill with
Letizia Panizza
LAURA CERETA
Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist ANTONIA PULCI
Edited and translated by Diana Robin Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival
Edited and translated by James Wyatt Cook
TULLIA D’ARAGONA
Dialogue on the Infinity of Love SISTER BARTOLOMEA RICCOBONI
Edited and translated by Rinaldina Russell Life and Death in a Venetian Convent:
and Bruce Merry The Chronicle and Necrology of Corpus
Domini, 1395–1436
CASSANDRA FEDELE Edited and translated by Daniel Bornstein
Letters and Orations
Edited and translated by Diana Robin ANNA MARIA VAN SCHURMAN
“Whether a Christian Woman Should Be
CECILIA FERRAZZI Educated” and Other Writings from Her
Autobiography of an Aspiring Saint Intellectual Circle
Edited and translated by Anne Jacobson Schutte Edited and translated by Joyce L. Irwin
MODERATA FONTE LUCREZIA TORNABUONI DE’ MEDICI
The Worth of Women Sacred Narratives
Edited and translated by Virginia Cox Edited and translated by Jane Tylus
VERONICA FRANCO JUAN LUIS VIVES
Poems and Selected Letters “The Education of a Christian Woman”:
Edited and translated by Ann Rosalind Jones A Sixteenth-Century Manual
and Margaret F. Rosenthal Edited and translated by Charles Fantazzi
Marie de Gournay
A P O L O G Y
F O R T H E W O M A N W R I T I N G
a n d o t h e r w o r k s
(cid:1)
Edited and Translated
by
Richard Hillman
and Colette Quesnel
General and Section Introductions
by
Richard Hillman
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Chicago and London
Marie de Gournay, 1565–1645
Richard Hillmanis professor of English at the Université François-Rabelais
in Tours, France. His previous books include Self-Speaking in Medieval
and Early Modern English Drama.
Colette Quesnelis affiliated with the Université du Québec à Montréal. She is
the author of Mourir de rire d’après et avec Rabelais.
Together they translated and edited Preface to the Essays of Michel de Montaigne by
His Adoptive Daughter,
Marie le Jars de Gournay.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2002 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2002
Printed in the United States of America
11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN: 0-226-30555-4 (cloth)
ISBN: 0-226-30556-2 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gournay, Marie Le Jars de, 1565–1645.
[Selections. English. 2002]
Apology for the woman writing and other works / Marie de Gournay ; edited and
translated by Richard Hillman and Colette Quesnel ; general and section introduc-
tions by Richard Hillman.
p. cm. — (The other voice in early modern Europe)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN0-226-30555-4 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN0-226-30556-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Gournay, Marie Le Jars de, 1565–1645—Translations into English. 2. Women’s
rights—Early works to 1800. I. Hillman, Richard, 1949– II. Quesnel, Colette. III Title.
IV. Series.
PQ1799.G65 A238 2002
848(cid:1).309—dc21
2001052272
oThe paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSIZ39.48-1992.
CONTENTS
Introduction to the Series vii
Introduction to
Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565–1645) 3
The Promenade of Monsieur de Montaigne (1594)
Introduction 21
The Printer to the Reader 27
Dedicatory Epistle 29
The Promenade of Monsieur de Montaigne—for Himself 33
The Equality of Men and Women (1641)
Introduction 69
Dedication 73
The Equality of Men and Women 75
The Ladies’ Complaint (1641)
Introduction 97
The Ladies’ Complaint 101
Apology for the Woman Writing (1641)
Introduction 107
Apology for the Woman Writing 111
Bibliography 155
Index 167

THE OTHER VOICE IN
EARLY MODERN EUROPE:
INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES
Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr.
THE OLD VOICE AND THE OTHER VOICE
In western Europe and the United States women are nearing equality in
the professions, in business, and in politics. Most enjoy access to educa-
tion, reproductive rights, and autonomy in financial affairs. Issues vital to
women are on the public agenda: equal pay, childcare, domestic abuse,
breast cancer research, and curricular revision with an eye to the inclusion
of women.
These recent achievements have their origins in things women (and
some male supporters) said for the first time about six hundred years ago.
Theirs is the “other voice,” in contradistinction to the “first voice,” the voice
of the educated men who created Western culture. Coincident with a gen-
eral reshaping of European culture in the period 1300–1700 (called the Re-
naissance or early modern period), questions of female equality and oppor-
tunity were raised that still resound and are still unresolved.
The other voice emerged against the backdrop of a three-thousand-year
history of the derogation of women rooted in the civilizations related to
Western culture: Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Christian. Negative attitudes
toward women inherited from these traditions pervaded the intellectual,
medical, legal, religious, and social systems that developed during the Euro-
pean Middle Ages.
The following pages describe the traditional, overwhelmingly male
view of women’s nature inherited by early modern Europeans and the new
tradition that the other voice called into being to begin to challenge its as-
sumptions. This review should serve as a framework for the understanding of
the texts published in the series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe.
Introductions specific to each text and author follow this essay in all the vol-
umes of the series. vii
viii Introduction to the Series
TRADITIONAL VIEWS OF WOMEN, 500 B.C.E.–1500 C.E.
Embedded in the philosophical and medical theories of the ancient Greeks
were perceptions of the female as inferior to the male in both mind and body.
Similarly, the structure of civil legislation inherited from the ancient Romans
was biased against women, and the views on women developed by Christian
thinkers out of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament were
negative and disabling. Literary works composed in the vernacular language
of ordinary people, and widely recited or read, conveyed these negative as-
sumptions. The social networks within which most women lived—those of
the family and the institutions of the Roman Catholic Church—were shaped
by this negative tradition and sharply limited the areas in which women
might act in and upon the world.
GREEK PHILOSOPHY AND FEMALE NATURE. Greek biology assumed
that women were inferior to men and defined them merely as childbearers
and housekeepers. This view was authoritatively expressed in the works of
the philosopher Aristotle.
Aristotle thought in dualities. He considered action superior to inaction,
form (the inner design or structure of any object) superior to matter, comple-
tion superior to incompletion, possession superior to deprivation. In each of
these dualities, he associated the male principle with the superior quality and
the female with the inferior. “The male principle in nature,” he argued, “is asso-
ciated with active, formative and perfected characteristics, while the female is
passive, material and deprived, desiring the male in order to become complete.”1
Men are always identified with virile qualities, such as judgment, courage, and
stamina, women with their opposites—irrationality, cowardice, and weakness.
Even in the womb, the masculine principle was considered superior. The
man’s semen, Aristotle believed, created the form of a new human creature,
while the female body contributed only matter. (The existence of the ovum,
and with it the other facts of human embryology, were not established until
the seventeenth century.) Although the later Greek physician Galen believed
that there was a female component in generation, contributed by “female se-
men,” the followers of both Aristotle and Galen saw the male role in human
generation as more active and more important.
In the Aristotelian view, the male principle sought always to reproduce
itself. The creation of a female was always a mistake, therefore, resulting from
1. Aristotle, Physics1.9.192a20–24, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, rev. Ox-
ford trans., 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1984), 1:328.
Introduction to the Series ix
an imperfect act of generation. Every female born was considered a “defec-
tive” or “mutilated” male (as Aristotle’s terminology has variously been trans-
lated), a “monstrosity” of nature.2
For Greek theorists, the biology of males and females was the key to
their psychology. The female was softer and more docile, more apt to be de-
spondent, querulous, and deceitful. Being incomplete, moreover, she craved
sexual fulfillment in intercourse with a male. The male was intellectual, ac-
tive, and in control of his passions.
These psychological polarities derived from the theory that the universe
consisted of four elements (air, earth, fire, and water), expressed in human
bodies as four “humors” (black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm) consid-
ered respectively dry, hot, damp, and cold and corresponding to mental
states (“melancholic,” “choleric,” “sanguine,” “phlegmatic”). In this schemati-
zation, the male, sharing the principles of earth and fire, was dry and hot; the
female, sharing the principles of air and water, was cold and damp.
Female psychology was further affected by her dominant organ, the
uterus (womb), hysterain Greek. The passions generated by the womb made
women lustful, deceitful, talkative, irrational, indeed—when these affects
were in excess—“hysterical.”
Aristotle’s biology also had social and political consequences. If the male
principle was superior and the female inferior, then in the household, as in
the state, men should rule and women must be subordinate. That hierarchy
does not rule out the companionship of husband and wife, whose coopera-
tion was necessary for the welfare of children and the preservation of prop-
erty. Such mutuality supported male preeminence.
Aristotle’s teacher Plato suggested a different possibility: that men and
women might possess the same virtues. The setting for this proposal is the
imaginary and ideal Republic that Plato sketches in a dialogue of that name.
Here, for a privileged elite capable of leading wisely, all distinctions of class
and wealth dissolve, as do, consequently, those of gender. Without house-
holds or property, as Plato constructs his ideal society, there is no need for
the subordination of women. Women may, therefore, be educated to the
same level as men to assume leadership responsibilities. Plato’s Republic re-
mained imaginary, however. In real societies, the subordination of women re-
mained the norm and the prescription.
The views of women inherited from the Greek philosophical tradition
became the basis for medieval thought. In the thirteenth century, the su-
preme scholastic philosopher Thomas Aquinas, among others, still echoed
2. Aristotle, Generation of Animals2.3.737a27–28, in The Complete Works, 1:1144.