Cross-dressed categories: Gender, genre, and class in seventeenth-century France

This dissertation is a study of the cross-dressed characters who appear repeatedly in literary texts and historical documents in seventeenth-century France. I employ the term cross-dressing to encompass all clothing strategies purposefully applied to manipulate sexual, economic, and social codes. Given this perspective, I use the cross-dresser as a kind of lens through which to view, and to question, the early, interconnected development of thinking about gender, literary genre, and, in modern terms, class status. I consider a variety of texts and genres--novels, fairy tales, theater, memoirs, political pamphlets, iconographs, and biographies--with particular emphasis on women authors prolific in their day but undervalued by modern readers. My first chapter includes analysis of first and third person accounts of real cross-dressers, including famed women warriors such as Saint-Balmon, in an effort to define a category woman. Next, I make a connection between transvesting and investing by comparing authentic and pseudo-memoirs by Abbe de Choisy and by Villedieu. Finally, I examine how three fairy tales by L\u27Heritier, d\u27Aulnoy, and Murat develop cross-dressed heroines as a means of challenging a model of (male) courtly behavior, and, in so doing, of undermining class structure and social order. My theoretical approach is most obviously Foucauldian, for I attempt to show how discourses construct(ed) ideological categories such as gender, genre, and class. I rely on the more recent feminist arguments of Marjorie Garber and Judith Butler to show that the development/performance of gender is not necessarily a recent phenomenon