Abstract
The editors of this collective volume aim to present a picture of the changes and continuities in French masculinities from the Medieval era to the present. Their authors intend to do this with literary snapshots that use close readings and a great deal of poststructuralist theory to probe the complexities of masculine self-presentation in both important and obscure texts. As in all collective volumes, some of these essays adhere more closely to this intention than others. A few authors are so preoccupied with literary hermeneutics that their texts transcend all historical contingency, but most of them set the ruses and self-delusions of male authors and their texts in a place and time and allow us to reflect on the diverse forms that French masculinity has assumed over the centuries. The short answer to the question, does masculinity change, is that it does but through endlessly reconfiguring the same set of anxieties, preoccupations, and tastes for dominance.
As the editors remind us in their introduction and bibliography of useful works on French masculinity, “entre hommes” is a programmatic title that suggests we must look more deeply at the relations between men as a crucial aspect of understanding the larger gender picture occupied by the dyad men/women. They indicate the institutional, intellectual, and cultural obstacles in France that have made French theorists more attractive, ironically, to Anglo-Saxon gender theorists and historians than to their French counterparts, who in any case exist in far fewer numbers and in comparatively weak institutional situations. Although many of the essays flirt with the theme of French exceptionalism, the volume does not have sufficient comparative dimension to begin to answer the intriguing question of why it is that the country with the most potent analytical arsenal for the analysis of gender has brought these weapons too little and too late to bear on itself.
Peggy McCracken’s essay begins by showing how in the medieval romance of Lancelot, men, as judged by their peers, could die nobly for women (and other men), while women in the romance died from spite or vengeance. David LaGuardia explores the theme of cuckoldry in Rabelais and Brantôme as an aspect of male performance—before an audience of other men—in which narratives about cuckoldry oscillate between the buffoonery of being horned by a rival and a murderous vengeance evoked to neutralize this notoriety. Women have little role in these performances except as repositories of erotic tricks to roil the waters, which they deploy, as it were, by nature. A naturalizing ontology is also identified by Jeffrey N. Peters as a method in Molière’s Le Misanthrope as a way of criticizing the shallow, “feminine” posturing of courtly life in favor of a mode of self-presentation in which exterior and interior aspects of the men are presumed to correspond.
Margaret Waller continues the theme of masculine performativity as an aspect of the dress codes sponsored by Napoleon Bonaparte for his officers and functionaries. At this transitional moment, men were both renouncing the elaborate costumes of old regime society to assume a subjective male gaze that takes women naturally as its object and inventing new ones that reflected the ranks and orders of Napoleon’s militarized empire. In his essay, Philip G Hadlock explores “donjuanisme” in some late nineteenth-century texts, and Lawrence R. Schehr reads Colette’s one novel principally about men, Chéri, as a story about the first metrosexual, a preening male who lives an inauthentic existence according to an internalized image of a lifetime of adoration by women. His sexual excesses, like Don Juan’s are compensations for the (fear of the) feminine at his core, which Colette sees all too clearly from her female perspective.
Lawrence D. Kritzman considers how Sarte’s fear of the feminine drove virtually every aspect of his life and work. In his biographies, plays, and novels, men are primordially restrained by mothers and by women and must master and embody “culture” and produce art to transcend the lowly “nature” of women and the vestige of it that resides within. We know Sartre was compulsively addicted to corresponding with the women he knew but seems to have used even de Beauvoir more as a sounding board than as a mirror of his masculine reputation, which was reserved for men. Ross Chambers analyzes Henri Alleg’s torture memoir from the Algerian War, La Question, to show how his willingness to withstand torture earned him the grudging respect of his male torturers, the toughest audience of all. Jarrod Hayes studies Camara Laye’s L’Enfant Noir as a case of a bicameral native/colonized masculinity with an uncertain male standard of judgment, and in the last essay in the book, David Caron reprises the homosexual politics of the 1970s as an ironic utopia of gay, erotic friendships, in which male group affirmation was more important for gay identity than the reluctant recognition accorded by the “order of families” that still constitutes French (and American) society.
Astute as some of these literary studies may be none of them manages to illuminate the paradox that the nation that has thought the most and the deepest about the constructedness of gender—despite resisting the word itself—has the most profound nostalgia for the natural “nature” of men and women.