Imagining Women’s Conventual Spaces in France, 1600–1800: The Cloister Disclosed by Barbara R. Woshinsky

Abstract

Thériault brings to this understanding of Mallarmé as obscure a new dimension , by proposing an innovative reading of his work (through an examination, not only of certain major poetic works, but also of lesser-analyzed writings, such as Les dieux antiques and Crayonné au théâtre), by suggesting that Mallarmé was situated between the act of the mystification and that of the demystification of his subject. Revealing through his art both the primacy of language and the order of desire, Mallarmé is reconsidered in this study as a doubly complex thinker, as Thériault underscores the inherent jouissance of both writer and reader in what he describes as “l’économie du désir,” taking as a backdrop the theoretical musings of such figures as Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Lacan. The dynamics of desire are thus posited as the basis for much of the hermeneutic nature of Mallarmé’s texts, and Thériault argues that the originality of Mallarmé’s position lies in the fact that the poet defines this desire, not as a sense of insuppressible energy, but as a sense of emptiness, a void. Following the work of Bertrand Marchal, Thériault further explores the epistemological foundation of the revelation of universal truth sought by the poet, notably in the prose of Les dieux antiques, with specific regard to the place of language and of myth in the Mallarméan model. In such a way, we can appreciate how the poet finds himself in a genuinely difficult position, trying to speak the unspeakable, to write that which is quite possibly beyond the scope of language, whether pragmatic or poetic, whether aesthetic or philosophical. Mallarmé’s project can be read through the methodological lens of the sociology of religions, with an emphasis on an archetypal phantasm deeply rooted in the human imaginary— the desire for direct communication with the absolute, the infinite, the immemorial . Not unlike the image of Apollo transmitting the enigmas of the oracle, or of Moses transcribing the divine word, Mallarmé’s poetic endeavor, epitomized in his unfulfilled aspiration to complete le Livre, can be read as a modern example of this age-old sacred enterprise. An additional area of exploration proposed by Thériault centers on the notion of subjectivity, through the presentation of another aspect of the core idea of revelation, i.e., how the poet does or does not reveal himself in his writings. Through a variety of discursive approaches and figures of speech—allusion, ellipsis, metaphor—the poet seems to suggest simultaneously his presence in his discourse and his paradoxical disappearance. Described as “[u]ne apparition en forme de disparition” (29), Mallarmé’s stance unveils an equivocal, protean nature, always poised on the threshold of the text, Janus-like, both here and not-here, accessible and obscure. University of Oklahoma Pamela A. Genova WOSHINSKY, BARBARA R. Imagining Women’s Conventual Spaces in France, 1600–1800: The Cloister Disclosed. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7546-6754-4. Pp. 344. $119.95. This wide-ranging book analyzes the politics of the convent and its representations in literature from the Catholic Reformation through the Enlightenment and beyond. Both “refuge and lockup” (300), the convent is a complex womancentered alternative community that occupied a unique position in the early 1176 FRENCH REVIEW 85.6 modern imaginary. The architectural enclosure may be understood as a woman’s body and vice versa. Cloistering was never as strictly enforced as we may imagine ; instead, convents saw a “dialectic of containment and privacy” (27). This fruitful tension drives the book’s analysis of the convent as both an architectural and a social institution. One of the delights of Woshinsky’s book is its treatment of little-known texts together with canonical works. Alongside the pleasure of discovering relatively unknown texts, this book offers the opportunity to encounter fresh readings of familiar ones. The author skillfully uses the motif of the convent to draw together disparate works. The analysis includes texts by many women writers who are finally making inroads toward the canon (into its parloir if not its cloître). Woshinsky’s book includes twenty-six illustrations, running from high-resolution to blurred, and the occasional footnote to...