Different accounts: Women's memoirs in seventeenth-century France. A study of class, gender, and genr

In this dissertation, I examine the tensions between class and gender in noblewomen's memoirs, a genre practiced almost exclusively by noblemen as a form of keeping accounts with the king. From the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries, the transformation of the French nobility from a military class to a heterogeneous group that claimed privileged status based on pedigree provided women the possibility of asserting their class-based right to write their lives. The opening paragraphs of the memoirs of Marguerite de Valois and Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orleans, duchesse de Montpensier reveal conflicts that lie at the intersection of class and gender and initiate strategies of noble self-construction. Mlle de Montpensier and Catherine Meurdrac de La Guette, both of whom participated in the Fronde, a period of civil rebellions that took place during the Regency of Anne of Austria (1648-1653), wrote memoirs in the tradition of men's military accounts; like the texts of their male counterparts, their memoirs serve to prove their worth to the king and to posterity. These women's adoptions of the men's mode of self-writing subvert the gender norms of the period and redefine the genre to include the possibility of a female hero. The memoirs of Hortense and Marie Mancini and Marie-Sidonie de Lenoncourt, marquise de Courcelles are self-justificatory accounts that literalize the legal meaning of the term memoire and that challenge the ideals of marriage and the family that dominate the seventeenth-century ideology of women's functions. These memorialists relate the unbearable nature of their marriages and cast their transgressions against "proper" behavior for noblewomen as the inevitable outcome of the constraints placed on them by their families and by society at large. In adapting the noble genre of memoirs to their own circumstances, these three female memorialists record the debts of the marriage contract. While complicity with the dominant ideology is necessarily implied in all seventeenth-century noblewomen's efforts to benefit from the privileges of their class, these memoirs alter the generic and genderic paradigms of seventeenth-century France.