Preface

Summary

Our expectation is therefore directed towards two other possibilities: that the social instinct may not be a primitive one and insusceptible of dissection, and that it may be possible to discover the beginnings of its development in a narrower circle, such as that of the family.

(Freud, Group Psychology, p. 2)

In the general revolution of sensibility that occurred during the seventeenth century, the modern “subject,” characterized most forcefully as a “psychological” interiorized being, as a privatized sense of the self, was given its first delineation. The central concern of this book will be to trace this delineation in the relation between French Classical literature (particularly, but not exclusively, dramaturgy) and the representation of the “family” as the mediating locus of a patriarchal ideology of sexual and political containment. Concurrently this study attempts to adumbrate the relation between sexual/political constraints, the ideology of the subject (the subjugation and the subjectivization of the individual) and the creation of a literary “canon” that represents and naturalizes this subjugation. Here, in defense of my privileging of literary texts in the analysis of the workings of seventeenth-century (French) ideology, even if I do not necessarily share his particular definition, I must appeal to Terry Eagleton, who has so vigorously argued for viewing literature as the prime object of such analysis. “Literature,” he writes, “"is the most revealing mode of experiential access to ideology that we possess. It is in literature, above all, that we observe in a peculiarly complex, coherent, intensive and immediate fashion the workings of ideology in the texture of lived experience ...”