Marie de Gournay, Poetry and Gender: In Search of 'La vraye douceur'

Abstract Marie de Gournay's poetic treatises and epic translations highlight her disgust at seeing the stylistic concept of douceur overly feminized in the verse of her Malherbian contemporaries. For Gournay this had rendered French poetry incapable of cognitive complexity. Gournay developed a new understanding of douceur through the notions of esprit and vigueur: a poetic style influenced by the Pléiade and by Montaigne. Gournay attempted to foreground douceur in complex metaphor rather than in euphony and rationalized clarity; she privileged forceful, oratorical vehemence rather than purely conciliatory discourse. Gournay dismissed her contemporaries' conception of douceur as mollesse, a pejorative vice commonly associated with women in her day. Conversely, douceur rendered through esprit and vigueur appears at first to privilege qualities more readily associated with men. However, in her search for 'vraye douceur' through the medium of Virgilian epic, Gournay shows that esprit and vigueur may be associated with ideals of masculinity and femininity — indeed, classical decorum should lead us to expect no less. Inspired by Virgil, yet also anticipating the femme forte of the 1640s, Gournay depicts a Venus who is douce yet vigorous, suggesting the possibility of a gender-neutral style for French verse.