The Dialogic Body and the Humanist Woman in the Self-Portraiture of Catherine des Roches

Abstract

In her “Dialogue de Sincero et de Charite”, Catherine des Roches creates an equally intelligent and lettered character in Charite, who embodies both erudition and erotic desire. A reading of the “corporal [af]filiation” between mother and daughter indeed reveals the symbiotic attachment of mother and daughter in both literary and social spheres. Yet a more refined version of Catherine’s self-fashioning can be glimpsed in her Missives. Through a juxtaposition of these two characters, to varying degrees historical and fictional, the image of a dialogical body emerges in the Œuvres. What might be described as a hybrid self-portrait thus exposes a distinct vision that the epithet of “tresvertueuse et docte fille” obscures: in Charite, who both reflects and extends the first-person narrator of the poems and letters, Catherine des Roches inscribes a dialogic body that is at once learned and sensuous, resistant and engaged―in short, a new model for the humanist woman.