New Pleasure in Life Unfolding: Madeleine de Scudéry’s Friendship Fan

Abstract During her long literary career, Madeleine de Scudéry developed complex representations of mixed-gender friendship. However, the fullest expression of this heterosocial paradigm can be found not in the novels for which she remains most well-known, but in the Conversations, her final published literary output. This article analyzes the description of a particular object, a lady’s fan, found in the Conversations’ chapter on friendship (1686). When we see the fan in both its historical and literary context, we see that the Conversations are also quite possibly the chef d’oeuvre of Scudéry’s literary career, the point at which, for the first time, her life-long concerns about the power of women to participate in the sociable world of the seventeenth-century letters unfold from within the frame of philia rather than of eros. The ‘friendship’ fan diverts readerly attention from Scudéry’s novels as it gestures toward a new, self-sustaining and self-renewing form of mixed-gender sociability. Through it, Scudéry artfully fashions a ‘new’ and ‘pleasing’ life in and of words for seventeenth-century women.