Antoinette Deshoulières' Cat: Polemical Equivocation in Salon Verse
Taylor, H
Date: 1 December 2021
Article
Journal
Romanic Review
Publisher
Duke University Press
Publisher DOI
Abstract
This article examines poet Antoinette Deshoulières’s (1638–94) interventions in a number of
querelles. It focusses on a series of poems published in 1678, early in her career, and written
as if from her pet cat. Often dismissed for their frivolity, these poems instead reveal
Deshoulières’s engagement with the Quarrel of the Ancients ...
This article examines poet Antoinette Deshoulières’s (1638–94) interventions in a number of
querelles. It focusses on a series of poems published in 1678, early in her career, and written
as if from her pet cat. Often dismissed for their frivolity, these poems instead reveal
Deshoulières’s engagement with the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns and the debates
about the animal machine. While such interventions constituted an important strategy for
making a name for herself, they are characterized by elusiveness. Although that elusiveness
has been read as a gendered strategy of modesty, I show instead that her equivocal and even
parodic, burlesque way of intervening in the two quarrels is consistent with her skepticism and
presents readers with a hermeneutical challenge which disrupts the rhetorical logic of a quarrel.
Deshoulières’s interventions invite us to reflect on the roles of gender, genre and interpretation
in early modern quarrels and their study.
French
Collections of Former Colleges
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