Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in Seventeenth-Century France, by Lewis C. Seifert

Abstract

The paradox of the masculine fop is one that captures the dramatic imagination, as seen in two characters in recent cinema set in the late seventeenth century: Archibald Cunningham in Rob Roy (1995) and Monsieur (Philippe d’Orléans) in Vatel (2000). Both appear at first as effeminate and therefore harmless, only to surprise their foes (and audiences) with their extremely deadly prowess with the sword. In his latest book, Lewis Seifert helps us position such fictional portrayals within historical literature from the same period, exploring the contradictions of a society requiring men to be both heroic warriors and cultured aesthetes. In his thorough use of case-studies from a variety of literary sources in seventeenth-century France, Seifert provides historians, sociologists and literary scholars alike with a critical appraisal of masculinities in a key period of transition. As wider trends in European thought shifted from the emotional to the rational, Seifert argues, behavioural roles performed by men were both questioned and reaffirmed. This paradox and resulting ambiguity forms the running theme to this study. Indeed, the author seems to take pleasure in muddying the waters of the history of sexuality, neither affirming nor denying the more one-sided theories posited by Foucault or Halperin. There is no linear trajectory from a world that saw effeminacy and sodomy as heretical to one that differentiated the act as a civic crime from the desire, as part of an individual's personality and the creation of the homosexual identity (or in Seifert's words, the ‘sodomitical self’). Instead, in an age seeking certainty and ‘absolutes’, there is ambivalence and nuance. But, rather than presenting one model, there are a variety from which to choose, from the honnête homme, the gallant or the ‘tender’ man of salon and courtly society, to the secretive, intellectual or fantasy worlds of transgressive poets and writers.