Le bruit qui court a la cour: Gender and the power of secrecy at the court of Louis XIV.

Examining early-modern French prose fiction and didactic treatises, this study analyzes secrecy not as the unknowable, but as a cultural economy of confidence and gossip that constitutes a fundamental mechanism and resource of discourse-as-power (Chapter One). Particularly during the reign of Louis XIV (1643--1715) in France, secrecy was essential to monarchic and gender authority and to those members of the elite who sowed seeds of subversion against that authority. Deployed by Louis XIV through mystification and ritual, secrecy simultaneously enabled rivalrous courtiers to challenge one another through dissimulation and gossip (Chapter Two). Secrecy is also integral to masculine authority. Asserting the natural indiscretion and loquacity of women, seventeenth-century French male authors (including Bouhours, Le Noble, La Mothe Le Vayer and Olivier) exclude women from political and discursive power by casting confidence, discretion, and friendship as masculine prerogatives. By contrast, Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves (1678) affirms the strategic utility of women's talk and the masculine vanity dissimulated by idealizations of male friendship (Chapter Three). Highlighting gossip as an essential medium of identity and power at court, Lafayette shows that gossip is both a critical resource for women denied traditional forms of power and a means of destroying the reputation of women. Moreover, men actively participate in the gossip they ostensibly decry because their masculinity (and hence, status) depends on a reputation of sexual prowess constructed through the circulation of bruit (Chapter Four). In opposition to cultural forms idealizing Louis XIV, the genre of the secret history, including Madame de Villedieu's Les Annales galantes (1670) and Bussy-Rabutin's Histoire amoureuse des Gaules (1655), demystifies monarchic grandeur through ambiguous amalgams of history and fiction that expose the secrets of the king's desire and thereby his common mortality (Chapter Five). Unveiling the use of secrecy to construct and to subvert the power of the seemingly absolute monarch and his courtiers, this dissertation ultimately contends that the secret of power lies in the power of the secret.Ph.D.European historyLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsRomance literatureSocial SciencesWomen's studiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132501/2/9963923.pd