Abstract
This inventive and highly important book brings the insights of masculinity studies to bear upon seventeenth-century France, and in so doing asks how that period might reshape our scholarly assumptions about the history of sexuality. In a series of elegant and thoroughly researched readings, Seifert demonstrates that what he terms “marginal masculinities” allow us to assess the masculine as a normative category of early modern France. Seifert’s debt to the important work done on the history of women is evident, but he rightly argues that in such scholarship, the masculine has for too long been considered an unmarked category, sidelining the complexity of early modern masculinity.
Approaches to this period are often in the thrall of Louis XIV, and it would have been easy to imagine a book on masculinity chiefly as it was exercised by that king. But Seifert’s book takes an admirable and necessary step away from the throne in order to read crucial dynamics and discourses that would have been obscured by so thoroughly nonmarginal a figure. The book takes in a variety of genres and displays a sure-footed ability to put historical texts into conversation with more recent theoretical allegiances: most prominently with Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, but Seifert’s argument is also illuminated by an engagement with David Halperin’s notion of gay abjection and by a deft reflection on Didier Eribon’s take on homophobic discourse.
The first chapter takes up the figure of the “honnête homme,” a model of ideal comportment who was key to the understanding of seventeenth-century culture. That figure has not usually been read as a gendered creation, but Seifert’s taut analysis of the discourse surrounding “honnêteté” shows the strain inherent to a culture that emphasized the importance of heterosociality at the same time that it depended on illustrations of male homosociality. Chapter 2 turns to the question of effeminacy in the court and the salon. Seifert carefully delineates these social spaces and the varied vocabularies that designated the behaviors associated with them. The chapter resists platitudes about the emasculation of the nobility under Louis XIV, and instead Seifert argues that absolutism provided new ways to imagine aristocratic identities and behaviors. This is an important challenge to scholarship on the salon: Seifert argues that the much-studied anxiety over satirical figures such as the précieuses does not merely allow us to understand something about the position of women in the mid-seventeenth century, but that it also reveals much about attitudes toward masculinity. These insights are pursued in Chapter 3’s reading of the poet Vincent Voiture and his model of salon masculinity. Chapter 4 stays with salon culture, offering an authoritative reading of Madeleine de Scudéry’s famous call for the cultivation of tenderness. This reading has much to offer scholars of the history of emotion, both for Seifert’s argument about the form of empathy that Scudéry delineates, and for the powerful rereading of the gendering of melancholy and of the complex scholarly history of that topic.
Chapter 5, on male same-sex desire, was for this reader the highlight of a compelling book. It offers a thoughtful assessment of the discourse on sodomy in texts ranging from ribald songs to legal trials. Seifert explores the strained complexities both of the category itself and of the case against it, arguing that the seventeenth century marks a new understanding of sodomy’s relation to masculinity. Seifert makes an audacious argument for the existence of a seventeenth-century closet, dodging anachronism by dint of a skilful reading that remains attentive to the historical nuance of the private or “particulier” in early modern France. The chapter, constructed in reverse chronological order in order to trouble a narrative about the “emergence” of a homosexual identity, covers a wide range of material and in particular gives a stunning reading of the prison writings of Théophile de Viau. Seifert argues that the poet’s sodomitical persona allowed the beleaguered poet to defend himself publically by rejecting a fixed or stable notion of sexual role, but he also suggests that in private letters with a close friend the poet moved toward an understanding of male friendship that Seifert reads in lyrical relation to Foucault’s imagining of “friendship as a way of life.”
Chapter 6 moves to the Abbé de Choisy, whose writing returns constantly to the passage from masculinity to a cherished femininity. Choisy’s accounts of dressing as a woman were once read as pathological and today are often celebrated for a neatly performative sense of gender. Seifert unsettles these assumptions by arguing for Choisy as an instance of transgender writing, and in so doing he gives full voice to the very particular and often pleasurable sexual subjectivity on display in these intriguing texts. This is a bold reading that did not always fully convince me, but I confess that it pushed me to delve again into the strange world of this writer with all my presuppositions troubled: what better way to assess the importance of a scholarly intervention?
This is a book that manages the rare feat of being both innovative and judicious. Seifert’s alertness to rhetorical turns provides a delicate assessment of the relation between often little-known lives and the intriguing set of writings they have left us. And if seventeenth-century writing on masculinity argued for the importance of civil manners and a sweet eloquence, let me say that even when Seifert differentiates himself from his colleagues he displays a conversational elegance and evenhandedness that would have been praised by salon habitués. This is a book I recommend as a model to anyone eager to stake their argumentative claim while also acknowledging their intellectual debts. I will recommend it also to students in need of an introduction to the period, for the book displays a rare ability to explain the essentials of a historical concept or genre. I am confident that this book will prove groundbreaking within the field of French studies on both sides of the Atlantic, and hopeful that it will find new forms of friendship in other scholarly terrains, too.