PFSCL XXXIX, 76 (2012 ) Introduction E LLEN M C C LURE In Le degré zéro de l’écriture, Roland Barthes declares that before Flaubert, “artisanal form” did not exist: “l’écrivain usait d’un instrument déjà formé, dont les mécanismes se transmettaient intacts sans aucune obsession de nouveauté; la forme n’était pas l’objet d’une propriété; l’universalité du langage classique provenait de ce que le langage était un bien communal, et que seule la pensée était frappée d’altérité. On pourrait dire que, pendant tout ce temps, la forme avait une valeur d’usage.” 1 It is tempting, especially for scholars of seventeenth-century French literature, to dismiss this statement as an objectionable oversimplification whose chief concern is less an accurate description of literary production prior to Flaubert than a celebration of innovative nineteenth and twentieth-century writers like Baudelaire and Proust. Yet Barthes’s claim that during the seventeenth century, language was fundamentally instrumental, placed in service to thought, is not inaccurate. Dominique Bouhours’s declaration, in his Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, that “les langues n’ont été inventées que pour exprimer les conceptions de notre esprit,” exemplifies a subordination of signifier to signified that was often held up as an ideal, and which has, for better or for worse, come to define the classical aesthetic. Critics have attributed the seventeenth-century suspicion of style to many sources, ranging from the period’s valorization of community and conversation to the Cartesian (and even Cornelian) praise of clarity. In proposing a panel on “Sinful Style,” I sought to elicit papers examining a less-explored aspect of this question—the link between style and morality, between authorship and sin. Due in part to the position of seventeenthcentury French literature as the cornerstone of the modern cultural identity of a secular France, echoes of theological issues and debates in works that are not self-avowedly concerned with religion have been downplayed by scholars. Yet the Augustinianism that pervaded so much of the period’s cultural life had profound, although at times indirect, implications for literary authors, most notably in an acute awareness of the inherent duality of stylistic innovation. Like Augustine himself, the period’s great writers were conscious of rhetoric’s incredible power as well as its seductive dan- 1 Roland Barthes, Le degré zéro de l’écriture (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 46. Ellen McClure 12 gers for public and author alike. A style that broke free from its moorings in the immateriality of thought or in the transcendence of the divine ran the risk of constituting an idolatrous celebration of the medium rather than the message, of becoming a monument to human vanity. 2 The articles collected here grew out of the papers presented at the 2011 MLA Convention in Los Angeles, and they eloquently illustrate the varied responses to the intersection of style and morality in seventeenth-century France. Sophie Maríñez’s fascinating account of Claude Perrault’s 1672 retranslation of Vitruvius' De Architectura convincingly demonstrates how Perrault used Cartesian notions of reason and clarity to challenge the gendered architectural hierarchy that Vitruvius and his Renaissance translators had enshrined as absolute. Maríñez’s architectural analysis contributes to and enriches the argument that Cartesianism provided a path towards the reconsideration of gender in seventeenth-century France. By unsettling the attempt to anchor architecture in the transcendent ideal of the gods or Man, Perrault’s footnotes to his translation of Vitruvius challenge the association of morality and style, replacing it with an appreciation of the relativism of both form and beauty. Alexander Roose suggests that Saint-Evremond’s rather unorthodox and provocative admiration for Petronius’s Satiricon reflects the exiled writer’s ongoing struggle to express the humility and instability of humanity. As Roose eloquently argues, Saint- Evremond’s stylistic choices can and should be viewed as a deliberate reaction against both the Augustinian suspicion of style and the Jesuit ornamentation that obscures human limitation. Indeed, Saint-Evremond’s refusal of obvious morality in style can be read as deeply moral. Finally, Barbara Woshinsky’s article provides a valuable and welcome corrective to the idea that Pascal, in good Augustinian fashion, eschewed any stylistic maneuvers that were not placed directly in service to the “pious enterprise” of religious conversion. Woshinsky persuasively demonstrates that Pascal engaged, frequently and enthusiastically, in rhetorical play that was as much, if not more, a celebration rather than a pointed critique of human folly, and that, appropriately and problematically, it is impossible to fold this playfulness completely into an overarching moral intention. Through their nuanced explorations of these varied sources, Maríñez, Roose, and Woshinsky all demonstrate the relevance of the question of style and sin to seventeenth-century culture, and have, I hope, helped to lay the groundwork for continued scholarly conversations on this rich topic. 2 Louis Marin’s beautiful study of the artwork of the period addresses this problem in depth; see especially his Philippe de Champagne ou la présence cachée (Paris: Editions Hazan, 1995). PFSCL XXXIX, 76 (2012) Straighten Those Curls! Style, Gender, and Morality in Early Modern Treatises of Architecture S OPHIE M ARIÑEZ One of the questions that some critics of architecture have recently grappled with has been the way in which gender and architecture intersect in a mutually reciprocating dynamic: as gender constructs about the “feminine” and the “masculine” can determine certain architectural choices, so can architecture—both as a tool of visual representation and a mechanism of spatial distribution—reinforce already existing gender constructs. 1 As architectural theorist Mary McLeod (1994) has observed, the vocabulary of gender has been entrenched in architectural discourses since the writings of Roman architectural theorist Vitruvius to the modern day. In his treatise De Architectura (B.C. 1), Vitruvius compares the architectural Orders to the human body, and equates the Doric order to “the strength and beauty of the body of a man,” the Ionic order to the matronly woman, and the Corinthian Order to the body of the young maiden (McLeod 41). Vitruvius’s association of the male body with simplicity, nudity, and brute strength, and of the female body with adornment and clothes, McLeod maintains, is a juxtaposition that has “persisted into twentieth-century architectural rhetoric” (42). Yet, she adds, it is not until the end of the seventeenth century that these descriptions of the Orders begin to adopt a “moralistic and judgmental tone” to become, by the eighteenth century, a discourse in which “femininity tend[s] to be associated […] with change, fashion, capriciousness, play, artifice, frivolity, charm, delicacy, ornament, and masquerade” (43). While McLeod’s observation can be confirmed in the treatises of the period, especially in the intriguing Parallèle de l’architecture antique avec la moderne (1650) written by Roland Fréart de Chambray, a treatise I will comment in 1 See the works of Diana Agrest (1988), Diana Agrest et al (1996), Shirley Ardener (1993), Judy Attfield and Pat Kirkham (1989), Ann Bergren (1992), Jennifer Bloomer (1992), Debra Coleman et al (1996), Beatriz Colomina (1992), Elizabeth Grosz (1995), Helen Hills (1996), Mary McLeod (1994; 1996) and Katerina Rüedi et al (1996.)