This study explores motifs of dissimulation and ambiguity in four works by Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette (1634–1693) and Madame de Villedieu (pseudonym of Marie-Catherine Desjardins, 1640–1683): La Princesse de Montpensier (1662), Zayde, histoire espagnole (1670–1671), Mémoires de la vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière (1671–1674), and Les Désordres de l’amour (1675). My analysis of these novels and novellas couples the doubleness of story and history with that of gender and genre as central categories for examining the literature of the period, within the historical context of the absolute monarchy in France.

The primary purpose of this study is to show how these works of fiction construct shielded narrative spaces for female protagonists written by female authors through varying yet complementary forms of dissimulation and ambiguity. These spaces have in common a narrative ambiguity constructed via irony, metatextuality, and other devices of dissimulation, including elements of play, which allowed the works to convey subversive ideas in a highly regulated and censored society. The study demonstrates how the practice of such dissimulation relates to social, philosophical, and political contexts, and how the works orchestrate dissimulation and ambiguity through contradictory statements, false intents and physical disguise to conceal or distract from a subversive message.

This analysis leads to a reevaluation of French literary history and canon, which is closely associated with this point in time: what is often called the grand siècle, the great century, or the siècle de Louis le Grand, the century of Louis XIV. It relates dissimulation and ambiguity to the status of female authors, as well as the practice of writing as response to a double marginalization of gender and anti-monarchism. Moreover, through connections to French history, and the development of the novel form nouvelle historique, which Lafayette and Villedieu have both been credited with inventing, the dissertation assesses how the authors thereby contributed to a rewriting of history in opposition to monarchic masculinist records. 

Romanen Zaïde, histoire espagnole av Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette gavs ut 1671, och handlar om en skeppsbruten grekcypriotisk prinsessa som finner kärlek med en spansk prins. För ovanlighetens skull i Madame de Lafayettes diktning får passionerad kärlek och äktenskap sammanfalla, och efter en lång tids uppvaktning som kantas av missförstånd gifter sig Zaïde med den man som hon är förälskad i, Consalve. Denna ”framgångsrika” historia flankeras eller skuggas av en rad olyckliga kärlekshistorier, som belyser Lafayettes jansenistiskt influerade pessimistiska kärleksfilosofi. Bihistorierna sprängs in i huvudberättelsen och anlägger en fond av berättelser om kärlekens inneboende omöjlighet. Den mest utvecklade av dessa bihistorier är relationen mellan Consalves vän Alphonse och Belasire. Den utspelar sig vid det spanska hovet, inom ramen för en absolut monarki som speglar den inom vilken författaren verkade. Belasires livshorisont utgörs av hennes älskares svartsjuka, som gör hennes liv, som realiseras i termer av hennes kärlekslivs fullbordan, omöjligt och ofruktbart.

Artikeln fokuserar på Belasires funktion i romanen för framställandet av kärleken som destruktiv kraft. Jag kommer att stärka berättelsen om den kvinnliga bifiguren som illustrerar kärlekens omöjlighet med exempel från andra kvinnliga bifigurer som Félime, Zaïdes syster. Tillsammans fungerar bifigurerna som en motpol till romanens eponyma hjältinna, genom olyckligheten i deras intensiva och olyckliga förälskelser. 

I år är det 400 år sedan Frankrikes mest kände dramatiker föddes. Molières förmåga att både tjäna och driva med överheten har gjort honom föremål för skiftande litteraturhistoriska omtolkningar. Men att hans slagkraftiga satir fortfarande behåller sin skärpa råder det få tvivel om.

Madame de Villedieu was a key figure in the creation of a new genre, the nouvelle historique. Born under the Classicism of Louis XIV, it developed in great part in contrast to the baroque or heroic novel. With multiple narratives of passionate love set in different lands and times, this nascent genre relates to the contemporary manifold discourses of passion. Its birth can be read as an insertion of something new or a shift in emotional regime in the time-place of Villedieu’s literary production, the absolute monarchy of the early reign of the Sun King.

In Les Annales galantes (1670) and Les Désordres de l’amour (1675), Villedieu juxtaposes anarchic passionate love in relation to monarchical power, in a comparison that implicitly criticizes the self-fashioning of absolutism as inherently rational. The nouvelle historique, whose conception and performance is dominated by women in the role of writer as well as that of reader, appears to undermine doxal historiography, replacing it with a history of political deeds and decisions motivated by hidden, forbidden, and corrupting passion. In dialogue with scholars such as Faith Beasley and Patricia Cholakian, I read Villedieu’s nouvelles as an exploration of the links between passion and violence of a state where the person of the monarch is intermingled with its institution: the chaos of one as bound to the lawlessness of the other.