Jennifer Tamas preaches for her parish. A parish where there are fewer and fewer faithful, at least in the United States, and which is called “French Literature of the 17th and 18th centuries”, of which she is a specialist. For Jennifer Tamas has been challenged, in a way, to justify the very existence of teachings “which American students often see as the legacy of ‘white privilege’, even considering that such literature designed by old/dead white men has absolutely nothing to teach them”. The argument is not new, as we know, and all forms of knowledge stemming from classical culture, in the broadest sense, are today subjected to a ruthless examination of morality and censorship across the Atlantic.
Didn’t Dan-el Padilla Peralta, professor of classics at Princeton, urge to “explode the canon” of Greek and Latin works, accused of legitimizing racism and inequalities over the centuries? Jennifer Tamas, on the other hand, wants to blow nothing but “educate our gaze”, even if some pages contain proposals that may cause controversy – but that’s the game of such books. His argument is both quite simple and extremely effective: the heroines of many classic works (Andromaque, The Princess of Cleves, Dangerous Liaisons, Bérénice, etc.), who have long been considered subordinate to society and the men, are in fact women “of refusal”. It is the reading and reception of these works over the centuries that may have made these characters “victims or submissive prey”. No, the Princess of Cleves is not a frigid woman!
The paradox, which must be accepted, is that these female voices of refusal are expressed through pages written by men, “because the great writers have always invited to read the texts from the point of view of women”. We can think of the anathemas that struck the Latin poet Ovid in the United States, accused of promoting the same culture of rape through the stories of hunted women that make up his Metamorphoses. The anthropologist Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux nevertheless recalled that “these stories in which women are very often the heroines, often pitiful, sometimes dangerously active and altogether as manipulated by the gods as men are, these stories that women knew so to tell well were heard by the poet Ovid who knew how to admirably make them heard in his turn”. Is Jennifer Tamas saying anything else when she urges us to “listen for the buried rustle of resistance voices”? The demonstration concludes with a distinction between “wokism” and “cancel culture”, which aims to preserve one, not without having (re)defined it beforehand, in order to better condemn the other. This final concession to a “at the same time” may seem a bit lukewarm to those who, on all sides, demand a definitive position in this debate. But it is a strong contribution in favor of the party of nuance, which currently has very few followers.
Not women. Freeing our classics from the male gaze, by Jennifer Tamas (Seuil, 336 p., €23).
