Reading Marguerite de Navarre with Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Abstract:

This article pays homage to Robert D. Cottrell’s significant contributions to Marguerite de Navarre studies, particularly his use of structuralist psychoanalysis, in interpreting both her spiritual and secular texts. While such an approach might seem anachronistic, Marguerite herself has been described as a fine psychologist avant la lettre. Her writings even had an influence on the seminars of Jacques Lacan, who confessed that the Heptaméron inspired him throughout his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis. One of the striking aspects of Cottrell’s body of work is that, for him, reading with psychoanalysis never means reading biographically: unlike some other critics, he always focuses on analyzing texts rather than the lives of their authors. Thus, we explore some of the rhetorical strategies he underscores, such as Marguerite’s use of anaphora and chiasmus, which appear to have a kind of mimetic function in her devotional mirror-poems, Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse and Miroir de Jhesus Christ crucifié. We also analyze Cottrell’s use of Lacan’s three registers—the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real—to illuminate the desire for union between human subject and divine Object in these spiritual mirrors. Finally, we consider promising avenues opened up by Cottrell’s readings, namely the theatricality and performativity of Marguerite’s works, some of which he likens to spiritual exercises. Without a doubt, one of Cottrell’s greatest contributions is to have treated all of the queen’s writings not only as equally important, but also as flowing from a deeply spiritual source.