The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa

In 1670 Louis XIV called him from Caen, where he had founded an Academy of Sciences, to Paris to serve as subtutor of the Dauphin. In 1674 he was appointed abbot of Aunay in Normandy, and shortly thereafter he ascended to the bishopric of Avranches.

      Neither his provincial origins nor his commitment to scholarship prevented Huet from being accepted in honnête circles in Paris. He became a regular visitor in Mlle de Scudéry’s salon and a friend of Mme de Lafayette. He published his Treatise as an epistolary preface to Lafayette’s novel Zaïde, histoire espagnole, which he had probably commented on in drafts as he wrote his treatise. Ignoring the tensions between a scholarly ethos of labor and a social aesthetic of play, DeJean seriously misreads this text and its larger significance in the debates it addressed. She makes Huet’s treatise a key expression of respect for the feminizing (or feminist) impulse in the early novel.⁵⁹ Huet was pursuing a quite different and in some ways opposed agenda. He did, to be sure, give the novel literary legitimacy by placing it in a lineage that went back to the classical epic. And he did conclude with a paean to Mlle de Scudéry, confessing his “astonishment” that a “girl,” not a man, had published three illustrious novels. Perhaps she had originally hidden her authorship, he suggested, and thus had deprived herself of “the glory that was her due” for working for “the glory of the nation,” because “she wanted to spare this shame to our sex.”⁶⁰ But Huet’s overarching argument was that the novel was an “entertainment,” though one that must be morally instructive. He was treading a fine line in a debate about the novel that would continue into the eighteenth century. In L’honneste femme Du Bosc had advised women that to be honnête they had to undertake serious reading, even in the works of savants; but he had warned them against reading novels, as their gallant love stories corrupted female readers insidiously, not only acquainting them with evil, but teaching them how to commit it.⁶¹ Huet obviously disagreed. But what made the novel a moral necessity was the fact that people were naturally “lazy”; unable or unwilling to understand the truth, they were instructed in the effortless reading of a story, without getting behind the fact that the story was a fictional “lie.”⁶² This was to say that the novel adapted to human weakness, whereas serious study overcame it. For all his admiration for this new genre being developed by women, Huet could not refrain from regretting its recent ascendancy in polite circles. The novel reflected the unprecedented “forms” of complaisance with which men in France had to win the favor of women. It is worth quoting in full a passage DeJean has ignored:

      [Women] have made novels their entire study, and have been so contemptuous of the ancient fable and history that they have not understood works which drew on them formerly for their greatest ornament. So as no longer to be embarrassed by this ignorance, of which they have so often the occasion to be aware, they have found that it would be preferable to disapprove what they are ignorant of, rather than to learn it. Men have imitated them to please them; they have condemned what [women] would condemn, and have called pedantry what was an essential part of politeness, still at the time of Malherbe. Poets and other French writers who have followed [Malherbe] have been constrained to submit to this judgment, and several of them, seeing that knowledge of antiquity would be useless to them, have ceased to study what they dare not put in usage. Thus a good cause has produced a very bad effect, and the beauty of our novels has brought contempt for belles lettres, and thus ignorance.⁶³

      It is not surprising that in his later years Huet became estranged from mondain conversational sociability.⁶⁴

The Intelligence of Women

      The last question raised in Bouhours’s Conversations is whether a woman can be a bel esprit. Surely he had heard the subject discussed in worldly circles. Eugène endorses the received view of women’s intelligence:

      This beautiful fire and this good sense (bon sens) of which we have spoken so much does not come from a cold and humid complexion. Coldness and humidity, which render women weak, timid, indiscreet, light-headed, impatient, babbling … prevents them from having the judgment, the solidity, the force, the precision (justesse) that the bel esprit requires. This mucus (pituite) of which they are full, and which gives them that delicate tint, does not accord much with the delicacy and the vivacity of l’esprit; it blunts the point, and weakens [the mind’s] lights (lumières): and if you reflect on it, what women have of the brilliant is in the nature of flashes (éclairs) which dazzle for a moment and have no point at all of consistency. They shine a little in conversation, and provided that one speaks only of trifling things (bagatelles), they do not speak badly, but beyond that they are not very reasonable. In a word, there is nothing more limited than the mind of women.

      The friends admit exceptions to “the general rule,” but agree that there is “some sort of opposition between the beauty of the mind and that of the [female] body.”⁶⁵

      The passage is as compact an example of the durability of ancient perceptions of differences between male and female intelligence as one is likely to find. It is geologically layered. The bottom stratum of conventional wisdom, including humanist scholasticism, was formed by Aristotle’s view of women as imperfect or incomplete men and Galenic humoral theory, which still dominated medical thinking and had long been integrated into neo-Aristotelian philosophy. In the tight body-mind nexus that this discourse posits, intellectual strength, or “force,” is in some way a function of physical strength, which in turn is generated by the power of heat. By virtue of her role in reproduction, and in sexual intercourse as it was commonly perceived, the female is a passive instrument of nature; the male acts on nature, willing and reasoning to dominate it. Humoral composition makes the female brain, one might say, a soft cold sponge; the male brain is fire-hardened metal. No less than lifting a weight or pushing a plough, though of a qualitatively different order, intellection is an exercise of strength. In her social being woman’s weakness of body and mind takes the form of a lack of self-command, and that is exhibited above all in her indiscrete and babbling speech.⁶⁶ Here we rise to the top geological layer, Bouhours’s critique of his own era. He extends the ancient stereotype of the babbling or chattering woman—the woman unable to control her tongue—to what was being haled in other quarters as women’s mastery of the art of conversation. Often extolled for its liveliness and subtlety, female esprit figures here as “flashes” that are ephemeral, irrational, and trivial. The epistemological assumption that runs through all the layers is that women lack the capacity for judgment. Bouhours draws on a standard philosophical concept of judgment as the grasp of universal principles and the prudent and consistent application of them to particular cases. It is above all in this power to abstract—to detach universal ideas from sensate particularity—that men demonstrate their superior intellectual strength. Paradoxically “solidity” lies in abstracting from the density of material being. Women are confined to the particular, in their thought as in their social being, which is to say that they cannot rise above trivia. Again Bouhours undercuts the feminizing lexicon of honnêteté. There is a clean difference between the “delicacy” conventionally attributed to women and the true delicacy of mind required of the bel esprit.⁶⁷

      The conventional wisdom had not gone unchallenged. In the traditional “argument about women” (querelle des femmes), stretching from the Renaissance to the mid-seventeenth century, women’s defenders piled on historical examples to prove that exceptional women could be just as virtuous, and just as courageous, as men famed for those qualities, and, less often, that they could be just as intelligent as men with great minds. But this amounted to challenging male supremacy on its own terms; attributes considered “natural” to men remained normative for women.⁶⁸ As the discourse of honnêteté put a premium on the distinct kind of relational intelligence required in polite sociability and particularly in conversation, female-coded kinds of cognition were revalued in a new hierarchical order of capacities of intellection. Now the qualities considered “natural” to women became normative for men. Men had to acquire from women a “natural” way of speaking; a lively sensitivity; quick intuition; gentleness or softness (douceur); delicacy; grace; amiability. To fail to do so was to risk a loss of honor, a social derogation from the elite of worldliness. Bowing to the imperatives of honor, one might say,