Tuesday 23rd January 2024, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls' College

Olivia Russell (St Hugh's College, Oxford): 'Dissecting the Written Body: Gaze, Violation, and Shame in Françoise de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne and Isabelle de Charrière's Lettres écrites de Lausanne'

In letter 12 of Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne (1747), young Incan princess Zilia is adorned in French clothing for the first time. When Déterville – the Frenchcaptain who rescued her from Spanish captivity – sees her new appearance, Zilia describes his reaction: “les yeux attachés sur moi, il parcourait toute ma personne avec une attention sérieuse dont j’étais embarrassée, sans en savoir la raison.” His face becomes enflamed and he clasps her hand, before pulling away and throwing himself on a chair at the opposite side of the room. A similarly dramatic scene arises in letter 12 of Isabelle de Charrière’s Lettres écrites de Lausanne (1785). Young Cécile is playing chess with a male suitor when, in a moment of passion, he grabs her hand and “sembloit la dévorer des yeux.” She pulls back, hides her face, and then leaves the room. 

In both scenes, Graffigny and Charrière rely on a specific language to make desire and, arguably, violation more visible to the reader. My paper will show how they each use the language of physicality to demonstrate an unspoken transgression of boundaries, but in such a way as to avoid calling the virtue of their female characters into question. Offering a comparative close reading, I will argue that they foreground certain body parts to express the destructive and violent force of gaze, and use affect to accentuate the presence of intangible forms of violation. Ultimately, this paper will show how Graffigny and Charrière use the body in their writings not only to comment on gender power dynamics, but also to criticise the expectations and education of women in eighteenth-century French society. 

Ramani Chandramohan (The Queen's College, Oxford): '"De trop parler est vilonie/Et de trop taisir est folie": Weaponising Speech and Silence in 13th-century manuscripts of Les Sept sages de Rome'

The premodern narrative tradition of Les Sept Sages de Rome stretched from Asia to the Middle East and Europe, encompassing more than thirty languages over a period of five centuries. Anchored by the retelling of a trial in which a mute prince is falsely accused of rape by his stepmother, the manifold adaptations of the Sept Sages typically use binary forms of speech to marginalise both characters from the courtly sphere. The text-world thus constructs and understands questions of gender and bodily impairment via the opposing axes of calumny and silence. This paper will focus on Herbert’s thirteenth-century Roman de Dolopathos, which belongs to one of the earliest branches of the Sept Sages cycle in western Europe, in order to examine how the romance uniquely shapes the weaponising of the verbal and non-verbal within its clerical and Cistercian framework. Through consideration of the Dolopathos’ understudied codicological context, I will show how medieval compilers, who incorporated the work into multi-text and multi-generic manuscripts, opened up the possibility of redressing the Sept Sages’ polarised treatment of speech. Whilst the inclusion of the Dolopathos alongside romans antiques and romans de chevalerie in MS BnF fr. 1450 arguably facilitates a recovery of the female voice, the didacticism of MS BnF fr. 24301 highlights a middle ground which questions the very need to either ‘trop parler’ or ‘trop taisir’.