Constructing the subject: Author and nation in Christine de Pizan’s prose epistles

Description

Issues of authorial control and intention are hotly debated in fifteenth-century France, pervading the literature of the time and overflowing into public debates and sermons. While Christine's central participation in the Querelle de la Rose has frequently been examined, the importance of the vernacular prose letter in Christine de Pizan's larger authorial strategy has been largely overlooked. Yet Christine's prose letters provide sharp insight into her construction of authorship and of the individual as subject, and prove an ideal medium for expressing her political and moral concerns. The prose epistle offers Christine a highly codified narrative space in which to articulate her existence as a woman author and her duty as a political subject. Prose's representational limits will not hinder Christine's arguments but actually help to express a new conception of the polis as a political force relating to every subject. The dissertation considers two groups of letters: the epistolary dossier known as the Débat and Christine's later prose epistles categorized as her oeuvres de circonstance: the Epistre à la Reine (1405), the Lamentacion sur les maux de la guerre civile (1410), and the Epistre de la prison de vie humaine (1418). In the Débat Chistine articulates a new subjectivity of authorship by presenting moral and political perspectives which differ from those of her adversaries. Writing in the vernacular is a political and cultural choice; Christine in so doing reconstructs France's historical past and posits herself as a “present” author who is attuned to France's political difficulties. In the oeuvres de circonstance Christine goes beyond the imagery of the Débat's absent prince to depict France as both subject and object of Christine's epistolary call to action. Like the Débat, these three prose letters alternate between allegorical discourse and the more literal discourse of the judicial text. Finally, in the Livre du corps de policie (1415) Christine posits the role of the author as necessary for the creation of a new French state, a state dependent on the author and her signature for its articulation.