CROSS-DRESSING CAPITAL: VILLEDIEU’S MEMOIRES DE LA VIE DE HENRIETTE-SYLVIE DE MOLIÈRE

The title of Madame de Villedieu’s novel, Mémoires de la vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière, is misleading, for the text is not, in fact, a memoir. Its author, for that matter, was neither “Villedieu” nor “Madame.” Marie-Catherine Desjardins assumed the name from a lover who failed to fulfill a promise of marriage; under its aegis she earned her living writing thirteen novels, three plays, numerous portraits, and countless poems.^[1] Her pseudo-memoir text recounting the life of Henriette-Sylvie is actually an epistolary novel composed of six letters written to “Votre Altesse.” It was published in three parts beginning in 1671, was popular at the time of its publication, and remained so throughout the eighteenth century.^[2]

Given Villedieu’s play with the categories “author” and “genre,” it is not surprising that elements of disguise also occur within the novel: the heroine, Henriette-Sylvie, regularly cross-dresses and passes as a man. To be sure, cross-dressing was a popular theme in seventeenth-century fiction; scenes from d’Urfé, Sorel, and Scarron, for example, quickly come to mind. Since the element of disguise permeates both the inside and outside of Villedieu’s novel, however, it would seem that her representation of gender disguise must be different from that of her predecessors. As I will argue in this paper, part of that difference is due to Villedieu’s concept of an “economy.” I use this term in two senses. First, I refer to the financial matters—making and spending money—that figure in the text; secondly, I refer to the ways in which Villedieu conceives of gender itself as an economy. As we shall see, the text presents an uncanny portrait of a (proto-)capitalist system and women’s place in it.

Identifying capitalist structures within the text may seem anachronistic, since, admittedly, capitalism as a economic system did not theoretically exist in early modern Europe. Yet, according to Mitchell Greenberg, “the seventeenth century mediated the change from an essentially outmoded feudal system of kinship to a (pre-)capitalist family network” (16). Evidence of this change may be found in the fact that the concept of “capital” as a material good did exist at that time. Furetière defines the word, “le fonds d’une rente, le fort principal, qui engendre et qui produit des intérêts.”

While this definition is not strictly the same as current usage (it does not consider modes of production, for example), two important components of capitalism, as it is understood today, are already evident. First, capital can be possessed, and secondly, capital can reproduce itself through trade and exchange. It is precisely this ability of money to make (more) money that forms the basis of modern capitalist economic systems. In retrospect, some of the financial innovations that took place in seventeenth-century France appear to conform to modern investment strategies. I have in mind here the monarchy’s sale of rentes and traités, Fouquet’s development of credit, and Colbert’s manipulation of exchange rates and rente returns to combat bankruptcy.^[3] Given this state of early economic affairs, I hope to show how Villedieu’s protagonist in Mémoires de la vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière develops from passive “capital” object exchanged between paternal subjects to active “capitalist,” using cross-dressing to manipulate her identity and invest (in) herself for social and monetary gain.

Villedieu’s text introduces Sylvie as an orphan raised in the woods by peasants; her parents’ identities are unknown, yet she becomes

Henriette Sylvie, par l’ordre de ma mere. . . . Henriette, sans doute, pour quelque raison qui n’estoit connuë que d’elle seule, et Sylvie, apparemment, parce que j’étois venuë au monde à l’entrée d’un bois appellé le bois de Sylves. (7)

Unmarked by the name of her unknown father, Sylvie’s identity is not grounded in aristocratic land; rather, she bears the name of a non-place, a random and wild wood. Equally significant is the fact that her names are matrilineal, chosen by her mother “for an unknown reason.” While her name(s) are eventually appended to include that of the family that raises her, Molière, the unresolved ambiguity of Sylvie’s origin makes her a perfect “capitalist” object, since pre-capitalist identity was patrilineal and was signified by the land of the father.

Sylvie does intimate that her legitimate father might be the Duc de Candale, a nobleman who happens upon her when seeking shelter from a rainstorm. She justifies this half-claim by citing the generosity with which Candale treats her. This generosity is a direct result, however, of his interest in Sylvie as a kind of investment. Remarking that she looks too refined for her rustic surroundings, Candale says to his companion, “je veux prendre soin de la faire élever, pour voir si je me seray trompé” (10). His attempts to win his bet—to see if she might pass for more than a peasant—spark rumors and “fit dire à plusieurs . . . que je luy devois la vie, et quelques-uns l’entendoient malicieusement” (10).

As Sylvie uses it here, “owing life” might imply that her birth is biologically due to Candale, yet categorizing him as her father is risky business. He is clearly a possible candidate, but the ambiguity of his status as father and of Sylvie’s as daughter is one of the most innovative aspects of Villedieu’s novel. Contrary to almost all “family-romance” stories of foundlings who are recouped into noble families, Sylvie’s identity is never firmly established. Her origins are always ambiguous. As a result, her journey to and through adulthood and society depends upon her own actions, actions that serve to establish her individuality rather than (re)absorb it into a plural family.

Much less ambiguous is the fact that the verb devoir may also be interpreted in strict financial terms. Sylvie may indeed be said to owe Candale a return on his lucrative bet, but she is not his sole investment. The Duc has also invested in a certain bourgeois financier, Molière, in order to have easy access to the latter’s wife, one of the Duc’s lovers. Sylvie explains the monetary relationship between the two men:

Il y avoit à Pezenas un Financier dont la femme estoit de ses amies [du Duc], et cet homme luy avoit obligation de toute sa fortune. . . . Je devins par ce moyen la cadette d’un fils qu’il avoit, et le denier considerable que le Duc luy donna en même temps, luy inspira toute la tendresse qu’il faloit pour bien contrefaire une amitié paternelle. (11; my emphases)

Candale makes Sylvie into a kind of currency that he uses to “buy” Molière’s wife. He would appear, therefore, to have won his wager in the woods, for he ends up getting two women for the price of one. The denier considerable that he gives to Molière at the same time is the equivalent of a rente, a source of revenue produced by an investment. Sylvie’s significance in this exchange approaches that of capital, which, from its earliest use, is defined as a material good that generates interest. Capital may be symbolically replaced by money, paper, or coin, but both are mere replacements for “real” material objects of value. Sylvie, who is not tied to a genealogical family or location, may easily be inserted into the marketplace where she becomes a source of income for Molière (at his wife’s expense). This substitution shows both an exchange of women and an early capitalist model of investing as the basis of a new proto-capitalist family structure.

Since the financier Molière accepts Sylvie, a little girl of five, as payment for his wife, we cannot mistake his status as a “capitalist” who trades material goods (or women) for money. He accepts, furthermore, the payment of/in Sylvie because his own biological daughter is dying:

On nourrissoit à ces gens-là, en une de leurs métairies, une petite fille de mon âge, qui estoit abandonnée des Medecins, et on attendoit tous les jours l’heure qu’elle mourût: Il n’estoit pas mal-aisé de me mettre en sa place dés qu’elle seroit morte, et de faire accroire, en la changeant de main auparavant, qu’on l’auroit depuis guerie à force de bons remedes. (11)

As with devoir in the previous passage, a double play is apparent here in abandonnée, for the “real” Molière daughter is abandoned by her doctors just as Sylvie was abandoned by her natural parents. In the capitalist system of the text, however, those with the means to pay can easily replace any lost items, and Molière is happy to accept Sylvie in lieu of his lost possession, his daughter. In this case the original daughter exists as a commodity for which the power of money, symbolized by Sylvie, can easily substitute. When this exchange is executed, Sylvie becomes principal under the control of the financier.

Capitalist systems of debt and exchange continue to function in the Molière household, for when Sylvie is older her “father” reveals his desire for her and immediately translates it into economic terms. Sylvie recounts a violent scene in the woods where Molière revokes his paternity:

Alors mon prétendu pere s’approchant un peu et m’embrassant tendrement, commença à me découvrir un secret, auquel je n’eusse jamais pensé, et me raconta l’histoire de ma naissance. Il m’étala ensuite les obligations que je luy avois. . . . Le refrein de tout cela fut que je devois répondre à sa passion pour éviter le vice d’ingratitude: qu’il m’aimeroit toûjours avec la plus grande discretion du monde, et que ce commerce n’empêcheroit pas qu’il ne me trouvât bien-tôt un party considerable. (14–15; my emphases)

Although Molière owes his fortune to Candale, he now indicates that it is time for Sylvie, his own investment, to repay him with sexual favors. By revealing his non-paternity, the financier destabilizes two family economies: first he revokes the material support parents typically provide children, then he restructures the genealogical unit so that the terms “father” and “daughter” no longer mean what they used to. He proposes instead a new “commerce,” where incestuous sex/rape might be traded for a lucrative marriage.^[4]

While Molière’s new economics is within the bounds of capitalism (he seeks a return on his investment), it is not well received by Sylvie, who quickly kills him:

Je le vis venir à moy comme un satyre, en jurant qu’il se satisferoit; je lâchay le pistolet qui le blessa de deux bales dans le corps: Voila, Madame, quelles furent mes premieres cruautez. (16)

Sylvie’s use of cruautez is curiously ambiguous, for her phrasing does not indicate which she finds more cruel: the fact that her financial support has been withdrawn or that the man she thought was her father made sexual advances. The import of the scene, however, lies in the fact that the (social, if not biological) parricide marks Sylvie’s move from passive item on a commodities exchange to active capitalist herself. Her violation of the family structure has the effect of out-financing-the-financier, and frees her from his control of the market. It has further profound effects on women’s place within kinship structures. Luce Irigaray’s reading of Lévi-Strauss and Marx, for example, asserts:

The economy . . . thus requires that women lend themselves to alienation in consumption, and to exchanges in which they do not participate, and that men be exempt from being used and circulated like commodities. (172)

The system Irigaray cites cannot sustain itself when Sylvie abolishes the family/economy Molière controls and thereby refuses to play a game that would exchange her first as sex object and then as marriageable daughter. In killing the father/financier in a new version of the primal scene, moreover, Sylvie assures that this financier can never reclaim the market she seizes.

Sylvie’s move from passivity to activity does not stray from the economic ethics with which she has been raised, for we soon see examples of her own capitalist tendencies. Up to this point Sylvie is used as currency to buy a woman; when she replaces the original Molière daughter at the age of five, she becomes principal under the control of an investor; finally she destroys her status as investment when she eliminates the financier. Even in her independent adult life, Sylvie continues to treat herself as capital, investing (in) herself and substituting for other people in order to increase her economic value. Sylvie dons numerous disguises of her own volition, appearing first as the niece of an abbess, and later passing as a man, either as a monk in a monastery, the brother of a young friend, or the German Prince of Salmes. Her eagerness to become other suggests that even when acting autonomously Sylvie does not subscribe to the notion of a “natural” self. On the contrary, she readily re-creates herself to improve her social standing. The freedom and mobility with which Sylvie presents and re-presents herself is analogous to capital, itself unfettered by social constructs of biological identity, gender or social condition (class).

Sylvie’s disguise as the Prince of Salmes is her longest assumed persona and the primary subject matter of Part Two of the novel. Sylvie originally chooses this identity in order to escape possible incarceration at the hands of her jealous, old husband, Menèze. She explains her disguise: “Personne ne douta que je ne fusse le jeune Prince de Salmes, dont enfin j’usurpai le nom, sçachant qu’il y en avoit un qui couroit l’Europe” (80). Sylvie’s successful appropriation of the Prince of Salmes’s identity is proven by the fact that everyone except her lover Engelsac believes her to be the “real” Salmes. Sylvie’s passing as male may be read as an indication that seventeenth-century society read (gender) identity according to precariously exterior signs such as clothes. Her cross-dressing implies as well that she assumes no obligation—or no debt—to femininity: when it is in her best interest not to be female, she quickly reforms herself as male. She does not forge a new male persona, but surreptitiously assumes the identity of a living Prince. When describing her disguise, Sylvie is unusually laconic: she simply writes that she is “en habits d’homme” (79). Consequently, her transvestism seems to be a substitutive rather than creative act and thus recalls her status as “replacement” in the Molière household.

Sylvie’s substitution as Molière’s daughter broke class lines by elevating her status from near nonentity, unnamed and illegitimate, to member of a wealthy bourgeois family. Her self-substitution as Prince radically transgresses gender and class limits and results in an even more dramatic rise, since she is now able to pass as an aristocrat: “J’allai même à la Cour, et j’y fus bien receuë” (93). Sylvie’s success as class and gender boundary-breaker may be applauded on a comic level, or, on a more serious note, may be appreciated as an example of proto-feminist praxis, according to which a woman takes control of her own destiny. Yet in considering the economic implications of her actions, Sylvie’s travesties are problematic, for, much in the manner of a contemporary capitalist, she wields power and manipulates social structures with no tool other than illusion. A capitalist, like an alchemist, makes money from nothing: a continual chain of symbolic replacements, the capital possessed need not be tied to anything real or material.

Playing with “what is not there” poses problems for Sylvie when she is assumed to have the (real) Prince’s phallus. When Sylvie charms a woman to the point of being pursued ardently and violently for sex, she must engage the help of her lover Engelsac in order to continue convincing all who believe her to be male. Engelsac volunteers to impersonate her impersonating the Prince in order to satisfy, i.e., penetrate, her admirer. The exchange of Engelsac for Sylvie as the Prince brings into play notions of substitution versus creation: Engelsac, equipped with a phallus (when not occasionally impotent), is the only one capable of meeting the conditions for (re)production. While she may look like a man from the outside, Sylvie does not possess this “tool” and cannot be creative in this role. In substituting herself as the almost authentic Prince, Sylvie acts as a modern day capitalist who controls the means of production by directing Engelsac’s action in this unusual romantic-sexual triangle. As such, she does not participate directly in the production/labor of love.

The fact that Sylvie controls the market of sexual desire “as a man” calls into question the relationship between cross-dressing and sexuality. It is notable that Sylvie is successful in wooing women when she poses as the Prince of Salmes as well as when she passes as the brother of a friend. Her degree of attractiveness to women, or the degree to which she makes a “good” man, does not depend, therefore, on her social condition. Disguised as the brother, for example, she appeals to a young woman and notes: “Je prenois plaisir à voir comme son jeune coeur s’échauffoit petit à petit, et se seroit laissé mener bien loin, si j’avois été propre à lui faire ce chemin-là” (372). For Adrienne Zuerner, Sylvie’s plaisir is sexual, particularly because on such occassions the cross-dressed heroine claims to be titillated (“chatouillée”) (113). Consequently Zuerner argues that Sylvie’s cross-dressing may be read as proof of female fetishism. Her observation is an important one, given that most theorists of transvestism have limited the term to men only. The typical line of argumentation asserts that women cannot be termed transvestites since they have no phallus to fetishize or reaffirm.^[5] This kind of limited definition finds cross-dressed women to be of no psychological interest and, more alarmingly, suggests that “femininity” is somehow a natural category. Allowing Sylvie sexual pleasure as a transvestite radically challenges male-biased theories of cross-dressing and gives Sylvie an active role in constructing her gender.

We should be wary, however, of over-investing Sylvie’s so-called sexual pleasure. After all, the kind of sexuality she sets up between herself—as a man—and the women enamored of her is always based on a heterosexual model: it is therefore necessarily destined for failure. Disguised as the Prince of Salmes, she needs a substitute phallus to do her work for her; and dressed as the young lover noted above, she avoids all sexual exchange, claiming that she is not “propre à lui faire ce chemin-là” (372). In fact, Sylvie never makes a single successful sexual transaction in the marketplace.^[6]

She does, however, effectively shut down trade altogether. By the end of the novel Sylvie retires to a convent, where she claims:

Je la trouve douce, le Convent ne me paroît plus ce qu’il m’avoit paru dans une vûë éloignée, et je pourrois dire qu’il ne manqueroit rien au repos de mon esprit, si je pouvois vous dire de prés comme je vous l’écris ici, que personne du monde n’est dévoüé à Votre Altesse avec tant de zele et tant de soûmission, que sa tres-humble et tres-obéïssante servante. (375–76)

Although Sylvie’s happiness in a convent may seem somewhat at odds with the adventurous portrait presented in her text, retirements of the kind were not unusual for women of her day—in fiction or in real life. In Sylvie’s case, in fact, the convent serves as the logical apogee for a chain of actions that defy exchange systems and the marketplace: in removing herself from the earthly world, Sylvie refuses to participate in an economy that trades in women. In so doing she may be seen as fulfilling Irigaray’s rhetorical question: “But what if these ‘commodities’ refused to go to the ‘market’? What if they maintained ‘another’ kind of commerce, among themselves?” (196).

This is exactly what Sylvie does when she sets up an alternative commerce, a textual one, with “Votre Altesse.” For she states that she would be happy in the convent if her intended reader could hear—ideally in person—that she is wholly submissive and obedient. These lines are the most passionate in the novel, and they suggest that Sylvie’s lack of phallus for material, penetrative sexual acts matters little in the face of her new textual romance. For this latter act she is well equipped with the necessary means, a pen, to (re)produce a successful text for her female reader.

The meta-writer behind Sylvie’s Mémoires, of course, is Villedieu herself, whose publisher, Barbin, paid her only one hundred sous per page but made a fortune from her writing.^[7] Both writers, Sylvie and Villedieu, play parts within economies of texts that suppose roles for those who write (“workers”) and those who reap the benefits (“capitalists”). Sylvie, for example, writes her life story to please her patron, “Votre Altesse,” who has requested an entertaining narrative. Villedieu, who earned her living writing from the age of sixteen, is dependent on pleasing Barbin and, more importantly, the public, consumers who will buy her commodity-text. Sylvie, however, is no victim of the marketplace. First she destroys the capitalist familial/financial system that would make a profit from her, then she recreates a new market by cross-dressing and writing about it. At this point, the fact that Sylvie kills a man called Molière might become a comical meta-critique of feudally patronized artistic creations versus those intended for mass-consumption. If Villedieu’s work represents a move toward the latter, she helps “kill” the other Molière, her contemporary, the King’s playwright.^[8]

The account of cross-dressing in Mémoires de la vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière is by no means unique in Villedieu’s works. Her frame narrative Les Exilés de la cour d’Auguste (1672–73), for example, contains two stories of female cross-dressers: one is a disturbingly good soldier, the other a too beautiful man. In Les Annales galantes de Grèce (1687), reference is made to a woman who disguises herself as her imprisoned lover to save him from capital punishment. Most interesting, however, is the story “Feliciane” in Les Annales galantes (1670). In addition to cross-dressing, this short story also encompasses the “economic,” for it begins with the abduction of the wife of a Spanish merchant in North Africa. Her daughter, Feliciane, falls in love with a visiting Spaniard. When he fails to return from a trip home, she dresses as a man in order to seek him in Spain, where she is mistaken for the young man himself. Feliciane uses the confusion over identities as a means to sow disorder in her lover’s obligatory affairs of the heart and to finally (re)win his devotion for herself.

Villedieu’s relatively frequent recourse to cross-dressing in narrative is useful to our understanding of seventeenth-century notions of gender and genre. First, it suggests that cross-dressing was viable in the seventeenth-century literary marketplace: since Villedieu wrote to live, rather than out of leisure, she presumably must have chosen topics that would appeal to buyers. Secondly, all of her cross-dressed heroines manipulate appearances to invest in their futures. Villedieu’s concept of dress, and especially the effect of dress on gender and social status, further suggests that her view of gender, in this case what it meant to be a woman, was not static. On the contrary, when she represents Sylvie writing about passing as a man, she links cross-dressing and writing in terms of investments that pay high rates of return. Sylvie remakes her gender in order to improve her social station to the same extent that Villedieu pushes the limits of the category “genre” by
writing a text that conforms neither to “fiction” nor to “history.” Villedieu’s new use of “memoir” may therefore be seen as a means of escaping the limits formerly imposed on both women and literary producers.

Works Cited

Albanese, Ralph, Jr. “The Dynamics of Money in Post-Moliéresque Comedy.” Stanford French Review 7.1 (1983): 73–89.

Audigier, Maître d’hôtel. La Maison bien réglée. 1692. Amsterdam: Paul Marret, 1700.

Clough, Shepard Bancroft, and Charles Woolsey Cole. Economic History of Europe. Boston: Heath, 1941.

Cuénin, Michéline. Roman et société sous Louis XIV: Madame de Villedieu (Marie-Catherine Desjardins 1640–1683). 2 vols. Paris: Champion, 1979.

Dent, Julian. Crisis in Finance: Crown, Financiers and Society in Seventeenth-Century France. New York: St. Martin’s, 1973.

Dessert, Daniel. Argent, pouvoir et société au Grand Siècle. Paris: Fayard, 1984.

Greenberg, Mitchell. Subjectivity and Subjugation in Seventeenth-Century Drama and Prose. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.

Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.

Klein, Nancy Deighton. The Female Protagonist in the Nouvelles of Madame de Villedieu. New York: Peter Lang, 1992.

Stoller, Robert. Sex and Gender. London: Hogarth, 1968.

Verdier, Gabrielle. “Madame de Villedieu and the Critics: Toward a Brighter Future.” Actes de Wakeforest. Ed. Milorad Margitic and Byron R. Wells. Paris: PFSCL Biblio 17, 1987. 323–38.

Villedieu. Desjardins, Marie-Catherine, known as Madame de Villedieu. Mémoires de la vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière. 1671–74. Tours: L’Université François Rabelais, 1977.

___. Oeuvres complètes. 3 vols. Geneva: Slatkine, 1971.

Zuerner, Adrienne. “(Re)constructing Gender: Cross-dressing in Seventeenth-Century French Literature.” Diss. U of Michigan, 1993.

^[1]The name she chose to go by contains a number of intriguing contradictions. First, “Villedieu” was the recently purchased title of a suitor, Antoine Boësset, so the appellation signified a kind of assumed identity for him as well. Secondly, Desjardins was never a “married” writer. Except for three posthumous works, all of her fiction was written and published when she was a single woman. In fact, when Desjardins married Claude-Nicolas de Chaste in 1677 (at the age of thirty-five) she stopped publishing altogether.

^[2]The novel was reprinted seventeen times by 1738, appeared in two collections of Villedieu’s complete works (1720–21 and 1741), and was published in English in 1672 and 1677.

^[3]See the works of Daniel Desert, Ralph Albanese, Julian Dent, and Shepard Bancroft Clough for general information on finances at the time of Louis XIV.

^[4]Dent asserts that, for the most part, the social condition of financiers was not very high. Consequently, “the area of the greatest social mobility is apparent in the marriages of daughters” (226). Since Molière stood to gain as much (if not more) than Sylvie through her eventual marriage, his promise to secure her a good catch hardly seems like a fair exchange.

^[5]Robert Stoller is one example of the kind of theorist I have in mind.

^[6]Even when she lives and dresses as a woman, Sylvie’s sexual life is plagued with problems: although Engelsac has no problem making love to other women, he is usually impotent when he is with her. Furthermore, one of their few “successful” sexual acts results in a miscarriage (210). I do not mean to suggest that seventeenth-century or, for that matter, modern expectations for sexual activity are linked to sexual reproduction. For my reading of the novel, however, I am concerned with how investments perform. Semen, in this case, may be read as a non-lucrative “investment.”

^[7]See Nancy Klein (214) and Gabrielle Verdier (324) for information on Villedieu’s and Barbin’s respective earnings. If the cent sous figure is correct, Villedieu’s total profit for Mémoires de la vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière amounted to approximately two thousand livres, a relatively small sum given the fact that she wrote the novel over a three year span. As far as standards of living went, secretaries of the time earned around three hundred livres per year. A typical noble household, which would have employed close to forty servants, probably dispensed over six thousand livres a year in wages alone (Audigier 32–35; 99–103).

^[8]The parallel parricide is especially apt, since Molière was a close associate of Villedieu and helped, in what may be seen as a paternal role, to advance the plays she wrote before devoting herself to novels.