"Be Such a Man as I": Mademoiselle Makes the Tour of Europe in Men's Clothes

Abstract

"Be Such a Man as I": Mademoiselle Makes the Tour of Europe in Men's Clothes SUSAN LAMB TELL me, gentle hob de hoy! Art thou Girl, or art thou Boy? For thy Gesture and thy Shape, And thy Features and thy Dress, Such contraries do express: Man, or Woman, thou art neither; Such a blot, a shame to either. Thy Oddities so much my Mind perplex, I neither can define thy Kind or Sex. Unghastly yet, thou only can'st provoke, Our Rage, our Detessation [sic], and our Joke. "The Petit Maître" in Satan s Harvest Home ( 1749) The years 1743-44 saw the publication of The Travels and Adventures of Mademoiselle de Richelieu, which purported to be an authentic tour account "Now done into ENGLISH from the LADY'S own MANUSCRIPT."1 Its narrator, Mademoiselle Alithea de Richelieu, or Monsieur Ie Chevalier de Radpont, is a wealthy, orphaned young woman who dresses herself and 75 76 / LAMB her maid Lucy in men's clothes to travel. She believes her tour as a man will "cure me of Prepossessions and Weaknesses incident to my Sex," and introduce her to the behavior of women toward a man such as herself "from... which I may draw Lessons extremely useful in the Conduct of Life" ( 1:329). To that end, she proceeds to flirt her way across France, Italy, Spain, Portugal , England, and the Netherlands, making numerous "conquests" of the hearts of other women (who think her a man), and listening to many courtship stories , accounts of "gallantry," and occasional dissertations on such topics as the origin and nature of the Passions. She finally resumes women's clothing and settles down in an explicitly erotic relationship with the "delicious" widow (Arabella de Montferan) who, on joining her tour at Montpellier, had also donned men's clothes. The Travels ' narration is predominantly playful in tone, and alternates between conventional tour description, topical dissertations, and novelistic romances in which sexual desire, when not restrained by circumstance, is unbounded. The "autobiographical" narrative linking the tourist descriptions hinges on sexual and gender ambiguity—the narrator is a male impersonator in love with her/his travelling companion, another male impersonator. By accepting the narrator as trustworthy and as an uncomplicated authorial mouthpiece , and by ignoring the generic conventions the author employed, this work has wrongly been identified as an apology for women's rights and as a transgressive celebration of lesbian desire.2 The satirical technique of masking the writer under an abhorred face to make ideas or behavior ridiculous was, as Howard D. Weinbrot has demonstrated, well-beloved by writers and readers alike in the first half of the eighteenth century.3 Alithea, or the Chevalier de Radpont, is arguably a satirical persona used to castigate women, early feminism, and same-sex eroticism and sexual love. Travels repeatedly transgresses gender categories to confirm, not to dismantle, them. To identify Travels in the way it has been considerably diminishes the work's sophistication and its implications. Its satirical voice communicates contemporary understandings and confusions about what it meant to be a woman or a man, and how same-sex erotic bonds (not only between women, but also between men) operated. Though I will be primarily concerned with the narrator and the stories in which she/he is a direct participant, thereby pushing to the background much of the Travels, a few words concerning the work's genre are necessary. The Travels is composed of highly heterogenous matter, ranging from sheet music to poems to theological arguments to political histories to letters to critical discussions of literary genre to place description to novelistic romances. Furthermore the narrator is, by conventional contemporary mores, monstrous. Not only does she choose to pass as a man, but she guiltlessly engages in an Mademoiselle Makes the Tour of Europe in Men's Clothes / 77 explicitly homoerotic relationship. Such relationships were legally actionable and publicly condemned.4 Similarly, the narrator's explicit refusal of male control, marriage, children, and God as things below the lot of an intelligent , spirited woman, was far from conventionally acceptable, even if it is raucously advanced. A work in which a narrator undefensively presents an unorthodox world...