Christine de Pizan: Myths and Processes of Humanizing and Valuing Women

Introduction

Christine de Pizan, whose literary output stands out due to its diversity, is considered the first woman writer to have made a living by her pen. Her early lyrical poems progressively give way to political and philosophical texts. Her Epistre Othea is seen as marking a transition between these lyrical works, deemed to be of a lighter kind, and her prose writings, regarded as being of a more serious nature. In fact, this text, which can be considered a mirror for princes, presents itself as a didactic work aiming to foster Hector’s moral and spiritual edification, and through the Trojan prince, the moral and spiritual edification of the dauphin. The mirror for princes is a literary genre used by scholars in order to advise princes and monarchs on how to conduct both their earthly lives and the affairs of state. Hence, the mythical stories present in Epistre Othea acquire exemplary value since they show the addressees of goddess Othéa’s teachings the set of positive or negative behaviours any knight is expected to follow or reject. However, the mythical and legendary figures thus evoked also introduce a subtle discourse on women’s rehabilitation, which will continue in Christine’s later works, namely La Cité des dames.

To serve the purpose of this chapter, the above mentioned two works have been chosen for the following reasons: Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea is her first far-reaching work in which the process of women’s humanization actually takes root; this issue will be further developed in La Cité des dames, written under the guidance of three allegorical figures: Raison, Droiture and Justice. Both texts resort to ancient myths and legendary and historical characters. It seems therefore essential to approach them simultaneously. In fact, the way in which the feminine image is dealt with in both texts takes on similar but also different contours. The dialogue in Epistre Othea and in La Cité des dames engages in with their source texts, among which Ovide moralisé and Des Cleres et nobles femmes need to be mentioned. It also echoes the particular inflections typical of the endeavour to rehabilitate women in Christine’s two works. That is the reason why the early 14^th century verse rendering of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the French translation of Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus claris have been introduced.

The analysis will be developed along two fundamental lines: Christine’s assertion of her persona as an author, and the rewriting of myths. In Christine’s writings, the building of her authority as a writer goes hand in hand with her project to recover the value of the feminine image. The legitimization process of her authorial discourse is evident in various ways: first, in the several reworkings of the prologues of Epistre Othea; then, in her choice of the epistolary artifice; third, in the tripartite structure of the fragments that make up her work; and last, in the goddess Othéa’s creation and in the re-adaptation of myths, which raises Christine to the level of a mythographer.

The discourse strategies which re-orient the reading of myths and the interpretation of classical historical figures are based on writing strategies that establish complementary relations between masculine and feminine exempla. They further suggest a certain neutrality stemming from a process of desexualisation of the examples which underlines the universal character of the vices denounced by Othéa. The rhetoric figures of the semantic field, such as paronomasia, associated with parameosis, which punctuate the life stories of La Cité des dames, are discursive processes, such as those mentioned above, which allow for a reappropriation of the ancient myths.