Enacting National Trauma on the Female Body in Aubigné's Misères: An Epic Motif

Abstract:

The French Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century coincided with a literary desire to validate French cultural dominance through poetry. As part of this goal, a traditional epic would establish a Virgil for France and a heroic story to equal Rome's. Though the civil wars prevented the composition of such an epic, they opened the path for Agrippa d'Aubigné's Les Tragiques, an epic account of the Wars themselves. As a Protestant poet on the losing side of national conflict, Aubigné rests upon epic traditions while using them to garner support for his faction and to blame Catholic leadership vehemently for the national crisis. This article examines the epic tradition (seen in Helen, Dido, Bramimonde, and others) by which national trauma and epic conflict are enacted upon female bodies. Aubigné uses this epic motif to specific rhetorical ends: gaining sympathy for the Protestant cause and lamenting Catholic oppression. He adapts the epic tradition to emphasize mothering bodies (pregnant or nursing) to heighten the horror of the war and win the audience to the poet's side. This adaptation of epic tradition takes two forms: the anthropomorphization of France herself and the presentation of victims of civil war. The Misères of the nation, lamented in the poem's first book, resonate in female reproductive bodies to universalize the trauma, thereby aligning the reader with Aubigné's outrage and grief. Though female embodiment of national trauma is traditional to epic, Les Tragiques finds a new angle that serves its rhetorical goals.