3 - Verba erotica: Marguerite de Navarre and the rhetoric of silence

Summary

The feminine has had to be deciphered as forbidden [interdit], in between signs, between the realized meanings, between the lines.

Luce Irigaray, Speculum de l'autre femme (1974)

“Female sexuality,” claims Luce Irigaray, “has always been theorized within masculine parameters.” Under the phallocentric order, the riddle of feminine sexuality has solicited desire to a dualistic tension between exhibition and pudic retreat. For Irigaray, woman, according to classical psychoanalytic theory, is conceptualized as a “lack”; seen through men's eyes, she has always been effaced in order to act as a blank canvas for the working out of his fantasies. And female desire, which is emblematized by the elusive figure of the clitoris, is characterized as “the negative, the opposite, the reverse, the counterpart of the only visible, morphologically designate sex organ: the penis.” In a culture that privileges phallomorphism, the presence of woman, according to Irigaray, is inscribed in a blank space, in the “nothing to be seen” already admitted in Greek statuary representation where the female sex organ is “both absent and sewn up.”

One must bear in mind this critical perspective, I believe, if one wishes to understand how feminist theory is thematized in the representation of female desire in the tenth nouvelle of Marguerite de Navarre's L'Heptaméron. Within this context it comes as no surprise, as the historian Joan Kelly explains, that Renaissance women's writing was “the metaphorical projection of her woman's state,” and from the male point of view it would be conceived as an idealized form of silence.