Hidden Agendas: Cross-Dressing in 17th-Century France

Abstract

In this much-needed study, Joseph Harris bridges the gap between two distinct approaches to cross-dressing. On the one hand, literary scholars have long recognized the fascination with the topic in seventeenth-century French literature and culture, but often without consideration of its implications for gender ideologies. On the other, post-structuralist theorists of gender have given a prominent place to drag as both a practice and a model, but usually from a presentist outlook. Fully versed in both approaches and bringing each to bear on the other, Harris has made an important contribution to the study of gender in seventeenth-century French literature and culture and, more generally, to the investigation of cross-dressing itself. Ambitious and wide-ranging, Hidden Agendas is the first study to consider this practice and its literary trope during this period in anything like a comprehensive way. Examining historical and fictional transvestites in dramatic works, prose fiction and memoirs from the entire century, Harris' study complements other work on early modern cross-dressing through the attention given to its image (as opposed to its ‘reality’) within the context of the seventeenth century. After an astute discussion of the historical, methodological and terminological parameters of his study, Harris examines attitudes toward cross-dressing in the period, reviewing the radically different responses to male and female transvestism and conflicting uses of cross-dressing at court (Chapter 1) and then the meanings of the cross-dresser in carnivalesque traditions and theatrical cross-casting (Chapter 2). Harris then turns to what he calls ‘transvestite poetics’, the representation and justification of cross-dressing in dramatic and narrative texts (Chapters 3–5). Emphasizing the importance of the final ‘anagnorisis’ or revelation of the cross-dresser's true identity, these chapters show how gender norms are by and large reasserted but also how the female-to-male transvestite in particular becomes an eroticized and potentially transgressive character. The last two chapters turn to memoirs and pseudo-memoirs in order to consider the cases of several late seventeenth-century cross-dressers. Harris argues that, if cross-dressing allows several women freedom from male dominance (although not necessarily freedom to assume masculine authority), the writings of Abbé de Choisy betray a profound ambivalence toward femininity. Finally, in an Appendix at the end of this book, readers will find a valuable list of ‘transvestite texts’, classified by genre and category (type of cross-dressing, cross-casting, etc.). Beyond providing a broad survey of cross-dressing in seventeenth-century French literature and culture, Hidden Agendas nuances some of the conclusions of contemporary gender theory. Thus, for instance, using the seventeenth-century example, Harris nuances Judith Butler's argument about the inherently subversive performativity of drag. And similarly, in spite of Marjorie Garber's claim, he shows that the cross-dresser does not always constitute a ‘third term’ between the masculine and the feminine. In sum, even if it retains some of the formal features of a doctoral thesis, this is an incisive and stimulating book that is now the principal study of cross-dressing in seventeenth-century France.