‘Liberating the Bible from Patriarchy:’ Poullain de la Barre’s Feminist Hermeneutics

Abstract

It seems anachronistic, even bizarre, to present François Poullain de la Barre — a Cartesian, sometime Roman Catholic priest, and later Protestant convert⁴— as an early modern feminist theologian. Contemporary critics, whatever their discipline, commonly define feminism not only as a critique of the gender bias in culture and society and its relationship to power, but also as a commitment to correcting that bias in favour of women. In other words, feminism, as we understand it, is not simply a critical stance, it is also a political movement.⁵ While this definition is appropriate in our own time, it cannot be generalized to the early modern period. In societies where women and men were disenfranchized, thinkers might denounce the injustice of the position of women, might even imagine a society in which women took an active and equal part in public life, but they were understandably unable to envisage a programme for social change.⁶ Nonetheless, their failure to articulate pragmatic political goals is not a sufficient basis, in my view, for denying them a place in the intellectual and social history of feminism.⁷ As contemporary feminists have shown, criticism of the androcentric bias of culture and society is a political act in as much as it seeks to change the consciousness of readers and, thereby, necessarily, their relationship to their culture and society.⁸ That is to say, although early modern feminists were not political activists, they were active critics — and Poullain is no exception — of the gender bias in the politics of knowledge.

Article Footnote

That, indeed, is the chief source of patriarchal power: that it is embodied in unquestioned narratives.

C. G. Heilbrun²

To find glimmers of this truth in submerged and alternative traditions through history is to assure oneself that one is not mad or duped. Only by finding an alternative historical community and tradition more deeply rooted than those that have become corrupted can one feel sure that in criticizing the dominant tradition one is not just subjectively criticizing the dominant tradition but is, rather, touching a deeper bedrock of authentic Being upon which to ground the self.

R. R. Ruether³

Article Footnote

1 I have borrowed this phrase from P. Trible, ‘Jottings on the journey’, in L. M. Russell (ed.), Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1985), p. 147.

2 C. G. Heilbrun, ‘What was Penelope unweaving?’, Hamlet’s mother and Other Feminist Essays on Literature (London: The Women’s Press, 1991), p. 109.

3 R. R. Ruether, Sexism and God-talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983), p. 18.

4 Very little is known about the life François Poullain (1647-1723), who added de la Barre to his name when he left France in 1688. He was awarded his Master of Arts in 1663; at about age twenty (1667), he became disillusioned with the scholastic philosophy prevailing in higher education at the time. His disillusionment was probably precipitated by his discovery of Cartesianism. He spent the next ten years tutoring in Paris, also publishing his three major works: De l’égalité des deux sexes (Paris: Jean du Puis, 1673); De l’éducation des dames pour la conduite de l’esprit dans les sciences et dans les moeurs. Entretiens (Paris: Jean du Puis, 1674), and De l’excellence des hommes contre l’égalité des sexes (Paris: Jean du Puis, 1675). In 1680 he was ordained priest and was appointed to a parish in Flamangrie in Picardie, and later (1685) to the parish of Saint-Jean Baptiste de Versigny. in 1688 he left for Paris, already a convert — it seems — to the the Reformed faith; by December 1689 he had sought refuge in Geneva. He married a Genevan magistrate’s daughter in 1690 and they had two children, a daughter later in 1690, and a son in 1696. In 1720 Poullain published La Doctrine des Protestants sur la liberté de lire l’Ecriture sainte, le service divin en langue entenduё, l’invocation des saints, le sacrement de l’Eucharistie; justifiée par le missel romain & par des réflexions sur chaque point; avec un commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jesus-Christ, ceci est mon corps; ceci est mon sang (Geneve: Fabri & Barrillot, 1720). Poullain also published two works on the French language which I shall not refer to in this essay. These biographical details are taken from M. Alcover, Poullain de la Barre: une aventure philosophique, Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature, Biblio 17 (Paris, Seattle, Tübingen 1981), pp. 9-20.

5 See J. A. Sabrosky, From Rationality to Liberation: the Evolution of Feminist Ideology (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1979), pp. 13-14. Sabrosky’s definition of feminist ideology includes the ‘delineation of both short-and long-term programs and strategies to implement feminist prescriptions and long-range goals’. See also, C. Venesoen, Études sur la littérature féminine au XVII ^e siècle (Alabama: Summa Publications, 1990), p. 9: ‘Depuis que le concept [du féminisme] a été forgé en France, la doctrine s’est accompagnée d’actions multiples pour élargir les droits et le rôle des femmes dans la société. C’est pourquoi la définition du féminisme devrait aussi inclure les pratiques et non seulement la doctrine’. Venesoen uses this definition of feminism to question not only the validity of feminist analyses of seventeenth-century French literature but also to question the legitimacy of identifying certain seventeenth-century French authors as feminists. However, if this definition were accepted, Poullain, whom Venesoen considers a feminist (see p. 10), would automatically be eliminated from the intellectual tradition of feminism, since, as we shall see below, Poullain cannot be said to be committed to a programme for social change.

6 This point is made by L. Abensour, La Femme et le féminisme avant la Révolution (Genève: Slatkine-Megariotis Reprints, 1977 [1923]), pp. 421, 424.

7 The majority of writers on historical feminism make this distinction, some even argue that it is anachronistic to associate the feminist ideology of the past with the argument for equal rights. Many critics suggest that, given the socio-economic position of women, any argument in their favour (even those which suggest women are superior to men) and any identification of gender imbalance in society and culture are historical manifestations — appropriate to their time and place — of what we now call feminism. See M. Albistur and D. Armogathe, Histoire du féminisme français du moyen âge à nos jours (Paris: Editions des femmes, 1977.2 vols), I, pp. 9–10; P. Hoffmann, La Femme dans la pensée des Lumières (Paris: Ophrys, 1977), p. 19; 1. Maclean, Woman Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature 1610-1652 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. vii-viii.

8 See J. Fetterly, The Resisting Reader: a Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. vii: ‘Feminist criticism is a political act whose aim is not simply to interpret the world but to change it by changing the consciousness of those who read and their relation to what they read’; quoted by J. Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 52.