Against Uniformity: Gournay’s Philosophy of Language and Literature

Marie de Gournay’s defense of figurative language and her attack on the purified language championed by the neoclassical Parisian establishment is a political as well as aesthetic polemic. The neoclassical ideal of clear, concise speech not only impoverishes language through its animus toward the use of metaphor; it assaults human subjectivity by suppressing the expression of rare emotional states through idiosyncratic symbols. The effort to impose a uniform, chastened national language is condemned as a species of cultural hegemony, in which individual and regional variations on the vernacular are suppressed.