The poetry and the life of Henriette de Coligny, Comtesse de La Suze.
Item
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Title
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The poetry and the life of Henriette de Coligny, Comtesse de La Suze.
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Identifier
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AAI9908322
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identifier
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9908322
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Creator
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Hall, Cheryl D.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Mary Ann Caws
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Date
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1998
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Romance | Women's Studies | Biography
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Abstract
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Henriette de Coligny, Comtesse de La Suze (1618-1673) was a widely known and respected writer of her era. She was innovative; reviving the elegy in France and writing long poems which are haunting, melancholic verses about unrequited love. (Her poems contrasted sharply with the poetry of circumstance and the more earthy poems or sterile love poems that were being written at the time.) She served as a link between two of the literary amazons of the seventeenth century: Mademoiselle de Scudery and Madame de Villedieu. She was tremendously influential for a generation of younger women poets, enabling them to publish. Collections of poetry by two or more authors began to be published; the ones bearing her name (Recueils La Suze/Pelisson) had the most success. They were reissued until the middle of the eighteenth century.;There are several twentieth-century scholars who cite La Suze's validity as a poet and her contribution to the literature of the century but it is difficult to find even one of her long elegies in print. In this study I began with a corpus of poems I could attribute to La Suze with certainty and proceeded to examine them in various contexts with respect to gender. In her poetry La Suze creates interesting metamorphoses as to the gender of her personae. For example, in a given poem the narrator may be male pretending to be female who then metamorphoses into his true male identity. This was not novel; from the very beginning of the seventeenth century this sort of transformation was common. L'Astree--still read at the end of the century--is perhaps the most salient example of the this type of gender treatment. But La Suze does this with poetry.;Though her poetry fell into oblivion by about 1750 her life did not. She belonged to a famous French Huguenot family; but it was the events in her own life which brought her notoriety. Her conversion to Catholism was so publicized as to split the Court in France in 1653. She shocked genteel society when, in order to gain a divorce from the Conte de La Suze, she resorted to a public trial on grounds of impotence. He failed to perform; she won the divorce. It was commonly said that she converted to Catholicism so that she would not see her husband in this world nor the next.;Her last elegy, written at the very end of her life, is encased in Madame de Villedieu's novel Les Memoires de la Vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Moliere. Villedieu actually wove the poem into the narration of her book, giving as the reason for its inclusion the imminent death of La Suze. The elegy and the novel interweave in a way which adds meaning to each. The Comtesse de La Suze certainly belonged to a community of women of the seventeenth century and deserves to be restored to her proper place among writers, and women writers of the century.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
