Christine de Pizan’s Queer Critique of Misogyny A. W. Strouse

MISOGYNISTS AS QUEERS IN LE LIVRE DE LA CITÉ DES DAMES1

hristine de Pizan, in Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (1405), insinuates Cthat misogyny is, as it were, a little queer. At the beginning of the City, Christine becomes duped into believing that women are monstrous, and, in opposition to this way of thinking, Lady Reason appears and begins to describe to Christine how misogynistic convictions themselves are in fact quite abnormal. To inoculate Christine against misogyny, Reason intimates that chauvinism might inspire a queer gender performance; she says that misogynistic texts have made Christine like a cross-dresser: “Tu ressembles le fol, dont la truffe parle, qui en dormant au molin fu revestu de la robe d’une femme” (1.2; “You resemble the fool in the prank who was dressed in women’s clothes while he slept”).2 With this analogy, Reason compares Christine, who holds misogynistic sentiments, to a foolish man who dresses like a woman. Reason implies that misogynistic texts produce a kind of drag on their readers. Reason’s queer metaphor is not at all trivial. A close reading of the City shows that her maneuver is part of a broader pattern in the text: Christine’s main rhetorical strategy in her critique of misogyny is to associate misogynists with what we would now call queerness. “Queer” is, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick puts it, an “open mesh of overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent element of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality, aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (8). In this sense, queer does not refer to literal homosexual relations or

1. This article began as a thesis written at the Center for Medieval Studies, Fordham University. I would like to thank Susan Dudash for advising that thesis and Jocelyn Wogan-Brown for her helpful criticisms of it; and I am grateful to the community of medievalists at Fordham, particularly Maryanne Kowaleski, for their support. I also wish to acknowledge the editorial advice of Steven F. Kruger, and I am indebted to the editors and reviewers at the Romanic Review for their thorough, thought-provoking comments. 2. All citations of the Middle French are from Patrizia Caraff and Earl Jeffrey Richards’s edition of La Città delle Dame. For quotations in English, I rely on Richards’s translation.

The Romanic Review Volume 104 Numbers 3–4 © The Trustees of Columbia University 254 A. W. Strouse identities. Rather, the term is far less specifc, and even equivocal. Throughout contemporary scholarship it is, in some sense, always provisional (O’Rourke 10). As Carolyn Dinshaw argues in Getting Medieval, we might think of queerness as always contingent: it is not known a priori but is “a relation to a norm, and both the norm and the particular lack of ft will vary according to specifc instances” (39). Paying attention to the ways in which medieval discourses fabricate queerness is, as William E. Burgwinkle (2006) suggests, the current task of medievalist queer scholarship (84). Instead of standing as a given, queerness involves instability and disruption, sexual desires and gender performances that, by their very existence, challenge prevailing notions about sex and gender. “Queer,” then, attends to the nonnormative, though its referents may vary, hinging on a particular text or culture. Of course, the fact that this word can stand for “any nonnormative behavior” might lead to some imprecision; but by limiting the scope of our discussion here to nonnormative behaviors that relate to sex and gender, our reading of Christine can be held to some defnitional limits while still embracing the term’s fexibility. That is, I use the term to refer to behaviors and characteristics that are defned in Christine’s text as aberrant and that are implicated in what we think of today as sexual identity, a nexus of gender performances, desires, beliefs, and acts—but that are not necessarily aberrant vis-à-vis contemporary norms that regulate sex and gender. Using the term here in a somewhat limited but still fexible way can help us to illuminate how Christine’s critique of misogyny pushes against old norms while trying to advance new ones. This article attends to the opening portions of the City through a queer lens. As I argue, Lady Reason mocks misogynists for having unmanly bodies. She also disparages their sexual desires as unnatural. Reason likewise ridicules misogynists as being practitioners of transgressive gender performances, and she suggests that misogynists are socially abject because of their emasculated bodies and deviant desires. It would seem, then, that Christine queers misogyny.3 Of course, when we speak about queerness—especially with regard to a ffteenth-century work—we raise a whole host of academic questions. First of all, the debate rages on between constructionist and essentialist approaches to the history of sexuality.4 Simultaneously, the nested issue of anachronism remains unsettled (Hollywood 174). Meanwhile, a growing body of scholarship explores issues of sexuality and gender within Christine’s particular corpus: scholars remain divided about the convoluted questions of Christine’s own

3. “To queer” something is to question its sexual legitimacy, as defned by Butler (232). 4. For a thorough discussion of the historiography on sexuality, especially debates between essentialism and constructivism, see Halperin. Christine de Pizan’s Queer Critique of Misogyny 255

politics5 and especially about her commitment to feminism,6 which itself is a term caught up in the problem of anachronism.7 These questions of course can bear tremendous intellectual fruits; yet we might momentarily bracket out such considerations, for the simple reason that, even though the term queer is problematic, its use can be productive. In the case of Christine, we might fexibly use the term to understand how Christine’s critique of misogynists operates. As outlined above—and as I describe more fully below—Christine’s misogynists are peculiar in a great variety of ways, all of which pertain, somehow or other, to sex and gender. It is precisely such a confuence of libidinal, morphological, behavioral, social, ideological, and hermeneutic oddities—all related to sex and gender—that the word queer is meant to cover. Indeed, Christine’s misogynists require a rather more fexible term of analysis—a rather more imaginative reading—than is offered by other, less anachronistic descriptions of their abnormalities. Some of the misogynists whom Reason describes are, she says, contre nature, and a historicist might very well prefer this term. But “unnatural” does not describe the sum total of ways in which these misogynists are odd. They are morphologically unmanly, sexually deviant, intellectually perverted, gender nonconforming, and socially abject; and the City does not work toward relating such characteristics to nature alone. Instead, they are attacked from multiple angles: put into play within the City are social mores, religious teachings, literary conventions, and all of these accrue into a queer identity that is not just “against nature” but queer in relation to multiple norms (a multifaceted way of being). Christine’s misogynists exist—to use Sedgwick’s phrase—in an “open mesh,” caught in a net of meaning that overlaps with many different discourses. The opening passages of the City offer up a view of misogyny that articulates it as a queer phenomenon. As this article demonstrates in its frst section, Reason associates misogynists with queer desires, beliefs, activities, social

5. See Brabant; and Forhan. For Christine as a political propagandist, see Quilligan and also Lynn. Other scholars have opposed the portrayal of Christine as a political writer: see Pinet; and Mombello. 6. Late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century scholars wrote extensively about Christine as a feminist; see McLeod, as well as Fenster and Reno. Later scholars have debated whether Christine is in fact a feminist. The bibliography on the question is quite extensive, but major contributions to this debate include Delaney (“‘Mothers to Think Back Through’”) and Reno (“Christine de Pizan”). 7. Beatrice Gottlieb shows the importance of seeing Christine’s feminist sensibilities while also pointing out the dangers of applying modern terminology. On the other hand, Mary Ann Ignatius attempts to relate Christine’s feminism to contemporary feminist movements. See also Kelly (“Refections”) and Richards (“Sexual Metamorphosis”). Natalie Zemon David sees the City as part of an unbroken line of feminist writing. 256 A. W. Strouse identities, and physical bodies. The second section describes how Reason, in providing counsel on the proper way to interpret misogynist texts, identifes misogynist literature as hermeneutically queer.

Reason’s Characterization of Misogynists as Queers As I have shown, Christine’s Lady Reason associates misogynists with queerness from the very beginning of the City. Reason hints that there is something queer about misogynist worldviews when she compares Christine with a cross-dressing fool. To review that passage at length:

Tu ressembles le fol, dont la truffe parle, qui en dormant au molin fu revestu de la robe d’une femme et au resveiller, pour ce que ceulx qui le moquoyent lui tesmoignoient que femme estoit, crut mieulx leur faulx dis que la certaineté de son estre. (1.2)

[You resemble the fool in the prank who was dressed in women’s clothes while he slept; because those who were making fun of him repeatedly told him he was a woman, he believed their false testimony more readily than the certainty of his own identity.]

Christine, who has read misogynist philosophy and come to believe it, is caught like Boethius in a melancholy stupor. Christine is not exactly a misogynist herself, but at this particular moment, she takes as true the doctrine that women are monstrous and inferior to men. Reason suggests that these misogynist views provoke a queer kind of gender performance. Becoming indoctrinated into misogyny is like performing drag, so that chauvinist texts corrupt their readers into performing gender queerly. This is not to say that, for Christine, misogynist texts are inherently queer; but she describes them as having a queer effect on her—they cause her to lose track of her natural gender. Reason marks out a connection between misogyny and queerness by comparing a woman under the infuence of misogyny with a man who wears women’s clothing. Misogynistic discourses make Christine into a queer fool who defes gender norms and defes them again—she is like an Elizabethan actor in one of Shakespeare’s comic plots, a man playing a woman playing a man. Christine (a woman) is like a man (the fool) who, cross-dressing, thinks he is a woman. Through this chain of similes, Christine is, in the end, like a woman; but she is a rather queer woman, a man doing drag as a woman. She has become a queer version of womanhood created by foolish men. She no longer resembles, Reason says, the truth about womanhood, but has become a strange male fantasy about women. Reading misogynistic texts produces in Christine de Pizan’s Queer Critique of Misogyny 257

her a mental state akin to cross-dressing. These texts, then, are doing queer things to Christine. Christine’s attempt to discredit misogyny operates partly by insinuating that misogynistic texts have queer infuences on their female readers; they distort how women relate to their “natural” gender. As Reason suggests, misogyny is similar to the queer idea that a person biologically sexed as a man might believe that he is a woman. Reason seems to acknowledge—in order to ridicule—the proposition that gender is a socially constructed phenomenon.8 The fool believes the faulx dis, the testimony surrounding his identity, rather than son estre, his essential being as a man. The fool in the prank, then, is himself queer—in Sedgwick’s terms, his gender does not signify monolithically. Thus Reason raises the possibility that gender is not naturally occurring but is created through performance—but only in order that she can repress and demean such a possibility.9 As the butt of Reason’s joke, the fool works to demonstrate the ridiculousness, the abjectness, and the queerness of those misogynistic views that Christine has come to entertain. We must, Reason says, discredit misogyny, just as we evidently must repress what can only be seen as the unnatural and absurd proposition that a man might, by behaving like a woman, come to think that he is a woman. The man in the prank holds a queer belief, and so he functions to associate misogyny with queer gender performances. Meanwhile Reason is using this analogy to describe the queer effects that misogynist texts have on Christine, who has become like a cross-dressing man. By the analogy, then, Reason has likened misogyny to queer practices and to queer beliefs, to the act of cross-dressing as well as to the testimony and creed that are said to underlie this practice; and she has suggested that misogynist texts inspire queer gender positions in their female readers. Reason queers misogyny further when she connects misogyny with men who have unmanly bodies. Outlining for Christine the process by which men become misogynists, Reason says that they are “ces viellars, ainsi corrompus” (1.8; “corrupt old men”). In Reason’s view, old age and corruption condition misogyny. Woman hating has to do with degeneration, especially with a degeneration of the male body. Reason tells Christine that, before men become misogynists, they are often quite sinful sexually. As these men age, however, their bodies fall apart, and this compromises the bodily integrity of their

8. Throughout her works Christine radically separates gender from sexuality to establish her authority as a woman; see Brownlee 339. 9. Note Reason’s method of reading the fool: she sees him as a man and chooses to read out his own account of himself as a woman. This hermeneutic mode resembles antiphrasis, a method of reading that Reason will recommend to Christine as a way to interpret misogynist texts. In the second section I return to Reason’s interpretation of the fool in my discussion of Reason’s hermeneutics. 258 A. W. Strouse masculinity. A withered, emasculated physicality inspires in these viellars a resentment against women:

Si ont dueil quant ilz voient que la vie—que ilz souloient appeller bon temps—est faillie pour eulx et que les jeunes, qui sont ores comme ilz souloient estre, ont le temps, ce leur semble. Si ne scevent comment en apporter et mettre hor leurs tristece fors par blasmer les femmes par les cuidier faire aux autres desplaire. (1.8)

[Therefore they are pained when they see that their “good times” have now passed them by, and it seems to them that the young, who are now what they once were, are on top of the world. They do not know how to overcome their sadness except by attacking women, hoping to make women less attractive to other men.]

In Reason’s account of these men, misogyny follows from emasculation. Older men, unable to perform sexually, disparage women. Their physical impotence, meanwhile, makes these old men doubly unmanly, because bodily unmanliness humiliates them socially. The viellars no longer can compete sexually against other men. In this account, misogyny is not common among young, virile men but is associated with a corruption of masculinity. As I have shown, Reason’s joke of the fool formulates misogyny as akin to queer actions and queer beliefs. Now she attempts to demonstrate that misogyny arises when men degenerate and become physically unmanly, sexually defcient, and socially emasculated. Misogyny in her view involves a queer mesh of practices, beliefs, bodies, and social identities. Repeating her construction of misogyny as arising from physical emasculation, Reason tells Christine:

Ceulx qui ont esté meuz par le deffault de leurs propres corps ont l’entendement agu et malicieux. Et le dueil de leurs impotence n’ont sceu autrement venger que par blasmer celles de qui joye vient a plusieurs, et ainsi ont cuidié destourner le plaisir a autrui, lequel ilz ne peuvrent en leur personne user. (1.8)

[Those men who are moved by the defect of their own bodies have impotent and deformed limbs but sharp and malicious minds. They have found no other way to avenge the pain of their impotence except by attacking women who bring joy to many. Thus they have thought to divert others away from the pleasure which they cannot personally enjoy.] Christine de Pizan’s Queer Critique of Misogyny 259

In Reason’s assessment, a defect of the male body prompts misogyny. Impotence causes men to attack women. Moreover, Reason hints that misogyny is a species of queer desire, in that misogyny attempts to divert men away from enjoying sexual pleasures with women. As a belief system, it interferes with the evidently normal male desire for cross-sex intercourse. Reason again posits an interrelationship between misogyny, sexual impotence, and social emasculation when she cites Ovid as an example of why men become misogynists. As Reason explains, Ovid was exiled from Rome because of his excessive promiscuity, and then:

Item, comme il avenist apres que par faveur d’aucuns jeunes poissans Rommains, ses aderans, il fust rapellez de l’exil et ne se gardast mie apres d’encheoir ou meffait dont la coulpe l’avoit ja aucunement pugnis, fu par ses demerites chastrez et difformez de ses membres. Si est a propos que cy dessus te disoie, car quant il vit que plus ne pourroit mener la vie ou tant se souloit delicter, adonc print fort a blasmer les femmes par ses soubtilles raisons et par ce s’efforça de les faire aux autres desplaire. (1.9)

[Similarly, when afterward, thanks to the infuence of several young, powerful Romans who were his supporters, he was called back from exile and failed to refrain from the misdeeds [i.e., sexual vices] for which his guilt had already punished him, he was castrated and disfgured because of his faults. This is precisely the point I was telling you about before, for when he saw that he could no longer lead the life in which he was used to taking his pleasure, he began to attack women with his subtle reasonings, and through this effort he tried to make women unattractive to others.]

Having lost his genitals as punishment for his sexual vices, Ovid is left with a physically compromised masculinity.10 Ovid’s body—castrated and deformed, unmanly—prompts him to attack women. As in Reason’s previous argument, the morphologically emasculated misogynist is a social outcast. Ovid cannot satisfactorily perform a normative masculinity; in the bedroom he is a failure, and in public he is an outlaw, a sex criminal. This mesh of queerness—physical,

10. On the queerness of eunuchs in the Middle Ages, consider Chaucer’s Pardoner, whose body has generated a good deal of scholarly discourse, as summarized in Sturges. Castration often works as a stand-in for nonreproductive sex in heteronormative discourse, as in classical poetry, medieval theology, and nineteenth-century discussions of sexual hygiene; see also Roberts. 260 A. W. Strouse sexual, and social—causes Ovid to spread disparaging views about women. As before, his opinions interfere with normative gender relations, in that they serve to make women unattractive to other men. For Reason, Ovid is simply one exemplum who proves a general rule about misogyny. In Reason’s assessment, lecherous men begin to hate women after the failure of their physical masculinity, a failure that is due to either the impotence of old age or the punishment of castration, with castration and impotence roughly equivalent as causes for misogyny. It is physical unmanliness that serves as a precondition for anti-female sentiments. Besides this physical dimension, the misogynist has a queer social status, since he is unable to compete with other men. Speaking of corrupt old men generally, and of Ovid in particular, Reason narrates how misogynists are queers morphologically and socially. Meanwhile these physically queer men corrupt others by purveying a discourse that queerly threatens the proper sexual union of men and women. Their false speech threatens the estre of natural sexuality. To conclude this line of argument, Reason again signals that misogyny interrupts the proper, natural sexual desire that men should have for women. Regarding misogynist attitudes, Reason says:

Saches que ce ne vient mie de Nature, ains est tout au contraire, car il n’est ou monde nul si grant ne si fort lien comme est celui de la grant amour que Nature par voulenté de Dieu met entre homme et femme. (1.8)

[This behavior most certainly does not come from Nature, but rather is contrary to Nature, for no connection in the world is as great or as strong as the great love which, through the will of God, Nature places between a man and a woman.]

Reason appeals to “nature” in order to suggest that misogyny runs contrary to the natural order of sexual desire. Misogynists oppose la grant amour that, by the will of God, all men naturally ought to have for women. Reason repeats this rhetorical gesture some lines later, when she sums up her remarks on misogyny. She again constructs misogyny as queerly opposed to male-female desire, saying that woman hating is

contre nature en ce que il n’est beste vive quelconques, ne oysel, qui naturellement n’aime cherement son per, c’est la femelle. Si est bien chose desnaturee quant homme raisonnable fait au contraire. (1.8)

[contrary to Nature in that there is no naked beast anywhere, nor bird, which does not naturally love its female counterpart. It is thus quite unnatural when a reasonable man does the contrary.] Christine de Pizan’s Queer Critique of Misogyny 261

As before, misogyny opposes male-female amour, making it a kind of queer desire. Describing misogyny as contre nature and desnaturee, Reason alludes to medieval antisodomy discourses,11 and her suggestion that misogynists do not erotically favor women works to insinuate something queer about their sexuality. By describing misogynists as a threat to cross-sex relationships, Reason fgures them as rather like the queer peccatum contra naturam.12 As I have shown, Reason’s argument against misogyny functions by ensnaring misogynists in a net of queerness. As we shall see, Reason’s instruction about how to read misogynist texts indicates that they are also hermeneutically queer.

The Queer Hermeneutics of Misogyny Misogynists are also, for Reason, hermeneutically nonnormative. Their texts, she tells Christine, must be read through a particular interpretative mode that operates in the exact opposite way from that of ordinary hermeneutic practices. Reason asserts that the readerly process of antiphrasis—interpreting a text to mean its opposite—is the hermeneutic key to understanding misogynist literature (1.2). Reason thus provides Christine with an empowering, antimisogynist reading strategy:

Et des poetes dont tu parles, ne scez tu pas bien que ilz ont parlé en plusieurs choses en maniere de fable et se veulent aucunefois entendre au contraire de ce que leurs diz demonstrent? Et les peut on prendre par une fgure de grammaire qui se nomme antifrasis qui s’entent, si comme tu scez, si comme on diroit tel est mauvais, c’est a dire que il est bon, aussi a l’opposite. (1.2)

[As far as the poets of whom you speak are concerned, do you not know that they spoke on many subjects in a fctional way and that often they mean the contrary of what their words said openly? One can interpret them according to the fgure of grammar called

11. Medieval literature frequently described male-male sodomy as against nature; see Burgwinkle (“Sodomy”). Medieval thinkers did not strictly defne the peccatum contra natura. Augustine, for example, considered many sexual practices to be unnatural; see Brundage 108. Still, Augustine frequently called male-male sodomy “against nature,” as in a much-quoted passage from the Confessions (3.8.15); see Jordan 34. Though Reason probably does not mean that misogyny is contre nature in the sense that it is akin to gay sex, she certainly sees misogyny as contre nature in that it challenges the “natural” love between man and woman. 12. An appeal to the natural is common among moralists and theologians who seek to regulate sexual activity, as described by Brundage (7). 262 A. W. Strouse

antiphrasis, which means, as you know, that if you call something bad, in fact, it is good, and also vice versa.]

Using antiphrasis, Reason inverts the categories of misogynist discourse, legitimating a kind of reading that champions women.13 Remarkably, Reason reads misogynist texts in exactly the way that she interprets the foolish man who mistakenly thinks he is a woman. The man, she says, must be read as the very opposite of what he claims to be—against his faulx dis, we must read his estre. In the same way, antiphrasis is the process of interpreting a word as meaning the opposite of what it says about itself. Under antiphrasis, the sign, like the fool, gives a kind of false testimony that must be refused by the reader. The misogynist is, in this sense, a hermeneutic problem much like Chaucer’s Pardoner, that hypocrite whose outer appearance and inner content are queerly at odds. The misogynist, Reason says, speaks in the kind of paradoxical mode that we often associate with the camp of gay culture, with, for example, the irony of Oscar Wilde. When Reason performs the same hermeneutic procedure on both the cross-dressing fool and the misogynist text, she discloses an imagined affnity between the two and between these misogynists and other queer fgures. To explore this confuence, we may recall how ideologies of sex and gender infected medieval beliefs about textuality. To illuminate how Reason’s hermeneutic instructions bear on the queerness of misogyny, we might read this advice in light of the substantial scholarship that demonstrates the eroticism implicit in medieval interpretive theory. Christine wrote within, and responded to, a literary tradition that interrelated sexuality and textuality. Reason recalls traditional hermeneutic theory when she says that misogynist texts are written “en maniere de fable” (1.2) and that they therefore require interpretation. According to medieval theorists of the written word, fables and allegories served as a way to discuss philosophical truths.14 These philosophical truths

13. Douglas Kelly gives a full account of how Christine uses antiphrasis throughout the City in Christine de Pizan’s Changing Opinion: A Quest for Certainty in the Midst of Chaos (84–88). See also Desmond 224. 14. Ancient and medieval grammarians held that antiphrasis is a species of allegory. Donatus considered allegory to be a trope by which another thing is meant, and he made antiphrasis a subspecies of allegory. Note too that he understood antiphrasis as irony of a single word. See Donatus 401–2. See also Desmond 200. The Stoics considered antiphrasis to be an etymological principle: words derived etymologically according to antiphrasis were derived per contrarium, as the opposite of their etymon. For example, bellum (war) was derived from bellus (beautiful) because war is not beautiful. See Knox 159. Differentiating antiphrasis and irony, Isidore notes that, while irony is signifed by the tone of voice, antiphrasis is signifed only through words; see his Etymologia 1.24. For further discussion, see Murphy 135–93. Christine de Pizan’s Queer Critique of Misogyny 263 could be discerned through proper interpretation. Such interpretation was thought to function according to a rather sexist set of erotic metaphors, so that patriarchal ideologies infected medieval hermeneutics.15 Infuential thinkers such as Macrobius, Augustine, and Jerome all likened allegories to women whose fabulous garments protected their inner truths, and many medieval male readers saw texts as feminine objects whose depths needed to be penetrated.16 Writing, too, was considered an erotic act, with the stylus fgured as a penis and parchment as a female body.17 Thus gender and sex norms controlled many medieval conceptions of reading and writing, and Christine’s works often respond to and oppose these hermeneutic assumptions. Scholars such as Tina-Marie Ranalli, Kevin Brownlee, Marilynn Desmond, and Sheila Delany have shown that Christine consciously replied to a textual environment that saw reading and writing as manly acts, and throughout her works she crafted her own authorial identity by engaging with eroticized literary theories.18 In the City, Reason would seem to be addressing these literary theories. While she considers the relationships between men and women, she explicitly raises hermeneutic questions, thereby involving the City in a theoretical discussion about how writing and reading relate to gender. Where many exegetes thought of the text as a female fgure, to be stripped and penetrated by a male reader,

15. Macrobius tells us that philosophers use fabulous narratives to protect nature’s truths from being basely exposed. These allegories are likened to variegated garments that protect nature’s nude fesh from the uncouth senses of men. See Macrobius 1.2.18. For a discussion of how these medieval hermeneutic theories operate according to a patriarchal logic, see Paxson. 16. Augustine and Jerome articulated interpretation as a gendered process in which feminine texts are penetrated by male readers; their infuence is discussed in Dinshaw (Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics) and Copeland. 17. The gendered relationship between writer and text is made explicit in Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose and in Alain of Lille’s De planctu naturae. Alain’s nature provides Venus with a very large pen with which to document creation. In the Rose, Genius exhorts humans to write with their styluses onto the beautiful tablets that nature has prepared for them, in order to propagate the species. See Alanus de Insulis 845–46. For further discussion see Dinshaw (1989) 7 and Ziolkowski. On the sexuality of grammar, see Bardzell (esp. 81–107); and Epp. 18. Christine sought to articulate writing as a process of gestation rather than as penetration; see Ranalli. Readerly strategies of antiphrasis were important to Christine’s development as a female author within a largely male tradition. As Desmond has demonstrated, Christine fashioned herself as an author by using antiphrasis and inventio in her authorial performance as a reader of Dido, using the fgure of Dido to authorize her vernacular writings in much the same way that Dante used Virgil (224). Moreover, Delany fnds that Christine roots her texts in a reading experience explicitly linked to gender; see her “Rewriting Women Good.” 264 A. W. Strouse

Reason suggests that the misogynist text operates according to a different sexual logic: as she says, misogynist texts work a queer infuence on their audience, making Christine like a foolish man dressed like a woman and convinced he is a woman. Instead of a reader fruitfully stripping the text, the text sterilely dresses up the reader. By employing and inverting the metaphors of sex and gender that were used to shape the norms of literary interpretation, Reason reshapes these hermeneutical/gender norms in ways that exclude misogynist texts, making them the queer that is excluded from normality. Her advice on reading misogynist texts thus operates at a meta-critical level, addressing the sexist ideologies that underpin assumptions about textuality. Prescribing antiphrasis for these texts, she insists that the relationship between their signs and referents runs contrary to our normal expectations. Given that this conversation bears on ideologies of sex and gender, such an abnormality represents a kind of hermeneutic queerness. Reason suggests that we should see misogynist texts as ironic, and, of course, irony itself is not necessarily abnormal.19 Still, it is not precisely true that misogynist texts are actually ironic, because irony depends on intention, and misogynist writers presumably write with conviction and sincerity.20 Reason gives little weight to intentionality in her use of antiphrasis. Instead, she directly thwarts and subverts the intentions of misogynist writers. Ignoring what misogynists claim about their own texts, Reason usurps their authority; she determines what their texts mean—just as she decided that the transsexual fool is a man, whatever his beliefs to the contrary.21 Reason switches the traditional hermeneutic terms, in which the reader is fgured as male and text as female, and instead performs an interpretation that penetrates and

19. As noted, Donatus and Isidore saw antiphrasis and irony as closely related subspecies of allegory (fn. 24). Medieval thinkers questioned the virtues of irony, since in their view it closely resembled lying; but they found ways to justify it as an honest means of communication. See Knox 50–55. 20. As Christine Reno points out in “Feminism and Irony,” understanding an author’s intention is crucial to appreciating irony. 21. Remarkably, Reason’s interpretive guidance, which comes almost immediately after her account of the fool, resembles the logic of the prank. Reason interprets the fool according to the same reasoning by which she would have us interpret misogynist texts. This logical parallel, together with the textual proximity of the two critiques of misogyny, establishes a connection between misogynists and cross-dressing, transsexual queers, since Reason performs the same hermeneutic procedure on both. Reason expects that we will read through the fool’s gender performance in order to see his natural sex. She wants us not to look at the cross-dresser, which would cause us to see a plausible performance of womanhood. Marjorie Garber eloquently describes these two distinct interpretative strategies: reading through and at transvestism (7). Christine de Pizan’s Queer Critique of Misogyny 265 emasculates male texts so that they are dominated utterly by her and by the imagined female readership whom she addresses. She strips misogynist texts bare and prevents them from speaking for themselves—from believing their faulx dis—queerly forcing them into the subject position so long occupied by women. Where misogynist texts have queer effects on their readers, forcing women like Christine into being like cross-dressing men, Reason’s solution is to take up a readerly posture that aggressively inverts misogynist texts, reading them against their intentions.22 Reason’s interpretive advice becomes all the more curious when we read this scene in light of Le Roman de la Rose, a poem that was instrumental to Christine’s development of the City (Huot 185). Christine ardently condemned the Rose, and Reason specifcally derides it. The Querelle de la Rose considered literary questions about hermeneutics, as well as discussions about sex and gender, so that these issues were interrelated.23 In her participation in the Querelle, Christine makes clear her position that hermeneutic deviance resembles sexual deviance, and she opposes theories of hermeneutic slipperiness

22. Karma Lochrie sees antiphrasis as a queer reading strategy and remarks that Christine celebrated the “spirit of antiphrasis, in which the artist resists representation through reductionism, diminishing its tyranny and stripping the vulgar masculinism of its ability to signify grandly.” In other words, for Lochrie, antiphrasis is a means of resisting masculinist signifcation (95). Also note that readerly strategies of irony are commonly associated with queer sexualities, as discussed in Sontag. 23. Minnis (2001) argues that traditional hermeneutic theory deeply informed the Rose debaters and that this theory assumed a strong connection between sexuality and reading (209–56). Debaters of the Rose interpreted the text through an eroticized hermeneutics. For example, in the Querelle de la Rose, Jean de Montreuil attacked Christine’s ally Jean de Gerson by insinuating that Gerson’s sexuality barred his ability to interpret the Rose properly. See Schibanoff. Montreuil writes that Gerson misreads the Rose because he is either constrained by his profession (as a celibate cardinal) or because “he is a man who is perhaps useless [inutilis] for the continuation of the human species, which is the end of this book.” For Montreuil’s letter in Latin and English, see McWebb 344–47. Also, scholars have found that the Rose connects reading strategies and sexuality. In the Rose, Jean de Meun’s Reason—not to be confused with Christine’s Lady Reason— discusses male genitalia and castration in a conversation that pertains to problems in medieval sign theory; see Dinshaw’s “Eunuch Hermeneutics” 34 and Hult, “Language and Dismemberment” 112. In Reason’s account, castration is linked with the Fall, and her discussion about postlapsarian linguistics focuses on the word “coilles” (slang for “testicles”). For Jean’s Reason, after the Fall (symbolized as castration) signs are now arbitrary. It is for this reason, she argues, that Amant is incorrect in his assertion that “coilles” is a foul and unspeakable word. It is this hermeneutic and erotic arbitrariness to which Christine would object in the Querelle. 266 A. W. Strouse as sexually immoral.24 As Jean de Meun writes in the Rose, the word “coillies” can be euphemistically exchanged with “reliques,” a linguistic process that Christine denounces. In her 1401 letter to Jean de Montreuil, Christine wrote:

et que ne doye estre repudiéz le nom «ne que se reliques feussent nommées». Je vous confesse que le nom ne fait la chose deshonneste de la chose, mais la chose fait le nom deshonneste.25

[And the word “which was merely called relics” must be repudiated. I grant you, it is not the word which causes the disgrace of the thing, but the thing which renders the word disgraceful.]

Insisting on an essential relationship between the “thing” and its “name,” Christine attacks Jean’s linguistic slippage; she challenges as obscene the linguistic theory underlying his diction. Christine looks to the estre of obscene language, regardless of whatever faulx dis are used euphemistically to cover it. She deems immoral those readerly postures that would efface the supposedly natural connections between sign and referent and insists that we read words for what they mean.26 Given the importance that Christine placed on linguistics as a way to regulate sexual vice, we can easily imagine that Reason’s interest in antiphrasis has an erotic undertone. When Reason proposes that misogynist texts have a peculiar relationship between sign and meaning, she implicitly connects these texts with the kinds of slippery hermeneutics that Christine fnds immoral. Misogynist texts are sexually suspect at the hermeneutic level, because—like the fool in the prank, whose sex, gender, gender performance, and speech are at odds—their outward signs are slippery. In Reason’s account, misogynist texts challenge the natural connection between sign and signifed. They need to be read through antiphrasis, because the relationship between their signs and referents is confused. Considered in light of the hermeneutic tradition’s gendered overtones, and given Christine’s suggestions in the Querelle that linguistic arbitrariness poses a threat to sexual decency, we can draw out the implications of Reason’s hermeneutic critique: misogynist texts are textually queer.

24. David F. Hult has argued in “Words and Deeds” that, for Christine, hermeneutic morality and sexual morality amounted to the same thing (365). 25. McWebb 121; also see Hult, “Language and Dismemberment.” 26. On this point see Hult, “Words and Deeds.” Richards notes that Christine was particularly troubled by the Rose’s semiotic slipperiness in his introduction to Debating the Roman de la Rose (xxx–xxxi). Christine de Pizan’s Queer Critique of Misogyny 267

Conclusion As we have seen, City of Ladies theorizes a deep relationship between misogyny and queerness. Christine’s misogynists have queer bodies and queer reputations; they promote queer desires; and their ideologies can be likened to queer ideas and queer gender performances. Hermeneutically misogynist texts are queer.27 Of course, Christine’s Reason does suggest other motivations for misogynists—she also says, for example, that some men have slandered women to prevent other men from becoming captive to vicious women (1.8). But in Christine’s project of debunking misogyny, her main rhetorical strategy is to queer it. This stands as a testimony to Christine’s rhetorical prowess, and it also has wider implications for the feld of the history of sexuality. In the City, we see the creation of a wholly queer fgure, the misogynist, who in his total queerness is akin to modern constructions of the “homosexual.” This misogy- nist has a queer identity that bears on his sexuality, ideology, morphology, and social status. The organizing principle of this queerness is not sexuality—as in the case of the homosexual—but rather this queerness is grounded in a posture taken toward gender. That is, the various queernesses of this misogynist are organized around misogyny. Nevertheless, in his sexual and gender difference, his resemblance to the modern homosexual makes him one of the frst fully queer fgures in medieval literature, along with Chaucer’s Pardoner. This is not to say that such queer fgures necessarily existed beyond Christine’s text in her society at large. Nor is it to make the claim that there is a stable “queer” across Christine’s œuvre. In Christine’s literary production throughout the frst decade of the ffteenth century, she articulated a wide range of sometimes differing ideas (Dudash 790). Her thought changed across her lifetime, and we must read her opinions with the understanding that they are always conditioned by the specifc genre and audience of each

27. Also, with a kind of intertextual joke, Christine may be likening misogynists to the “Sirens” of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae. At the beginning of the Consolation, Boethius is under the infuence of depressing Muses who inspire him to sing a lament. Likewise, Christine, at the outset of the City, is distressed because of her literary infuences. In the Consolation, Boethius’s Muses are explicitly described as deviant women—Lady Philosophy calls the Muses scenicas meretriculas and Sirenes, and she also uses antifemale rhetoric in her critique of Fortune. When Reason appears to Christine, she does not explicitly call Matheolus a whore or a Siren, but a structural parallel between these two texts makes the accusation implicit. On Christine’s relationship with Boethius, see Paupert; Margolis, An Introduction to Christine de Pizan (70); and Hoche. Also, Margolis has identifed various prison images in the City, and these might link the text with Boethius’s Consolation (“The Human Prison”). Note too that the opening gambit of Christine’s City alludes to the biblical annunciation to Mary, as discussed in Kolve. 268 A. W. Strouse individual text. In fact, Christine sometimes condones what we might think of as queer. Even in the City, Christine celebrates two cross-dressers, the saints Marina and Euphrosyne, and cross-dressing and transsexualism work in many different ways throughout the book (Dor 209). Likewise, in the Livre de la mutacion de fortune, Christine herself is transformed into a man. Christine’s gender-bending mutation is meant to mimic the Incarnation and thus enables Christine to shape for herself an authoritative voice.28 Cross-dressing likewise is a mechanism for transcendence in Christine’s fnal work, the Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc (1429).29 There is, then, no fxed “queer” that runs throughout Christine’s œuvre, but, in the case of her critique of misogyny, it seems clear that she meant to poke fun at misogynists and to insinuate that they are at odds with sex and gender norms. In queering these men so thoroughly, Christine creates a wholly queer fgure, which, if nothing else, is a testament to her rhetorical virtuosity. Close attention to Christine’s rhetorical performance in the City does not end, however, at aesthetic appreciation, since the City is fully involved in Christine’s broader project of recuperating women. In some sense, Christine’s City is in itself a queer text, because it opens up and enters into a mesh of sexual overlaps, of gender dissonances and resonances. The City questions what constitutes gender, and it ultimately disrupts gender boundaries.30 Christine’s text sets out to smash the gender norms of misogyny. It aims to advance a gender system in which men and women are equal. Christine accomplishes this reconceptualization of gender by queering misogyny, by contesting the terms of misogyny’s sexual legitimacy. Christine does not simply describe or criticize a given queer sexuality; she actively creates queerness, constructing it by critiquing her opponents. To validate her arguments

28. See Thompson. For a discussion of Christine’s metamorphosis from female to male in the Mutacion, see Nephew. 29. In Christine’s account, Joan’s gender performance is not queerly against nature; instead it wonderfully exceeds nature. Joan is oultre nature (stanza 24) and fors nature (stanza 35); see Christine de Pizan, Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc. For some discussion of major differences between Joan and other depictions of women by Christine, see Rosalind Brown-Grant. Deborah A. Fraioli locates the poem within the early theological debate over whether Joan was divinely inspired; see Joan of Arc: The Early Debate. Stephen G. Nichols suggests that Christine’s Joan departs from earlier depictions of saints and envisages a new kind of Christian prophet who fulflls a religious and social role like that of the Old Testament prophets. On Joan as a preternatural saint, rather than as a cross-dresser, see Fraioli, “Why Joan of Arc Never Became an Amazon.” On Joan as Christian warrior, see Guéret-Laferté 108. 30. Christine “regenders” the body politic in the City, as argued by Kellogg. Glenn Burger discusses how gender categories were “undone” and “remade” during the late- medieval period. Christine de Pizan’s Queer Critique of Misogyny 269 against misogyny Christine shows how her opponents, not she, are queer. On this point we might consider how the fool in the prank perhaps serves as a metaphor for how women cannot easily exist within patriarchal discourse. Christine, herself a woman, is said by Reason to resemble a man who mistakes himself for a woman. Thus Christine, at the opening of the City, is like a woman, with a certain distance inserted. This distance, perhaps, resembles a man’s misperception of what it means to be a woman. By deconstructing the misogynist’s foolish image of women, Christine points up the queerness implicit in patriarchy, which, by reducing women to fgments of the male imagination, relies on a kind of transsexual psychic projection. Christine, while she works to redefne the categories of male and female, especially as they relate to each other, does so through the rhetorical construction of a misogynistic queerness that she opposes to her own gender norms. Christine creates a new defnition of what is queer and what is normative by showing how the old norms are queer.

City University of New York

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