Textual Materiality in Louise Bourgeois’s Observations diverses

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Acknowledgments

Deep thanks to the outside reader, to Alison Klairmont Lingo, and to Amyrose McCue Gill for their many helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

¹ Reynard offers an interesting feminist perspective on part of the Quarrel.

² Although Liebault may have proclaimed the womb “noble,” a little more than a hundred years later, no less a linguistic authority than the Dictionary of the Académie Française designated the vital internal organs as the “noble parts” and the reproductive organs as the “shameful parts.”Dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise, 1st ed. (1694), s.vv. “parties nobles” and “parties honteuses.”

³ No critical edition in French exists yet. The 1992 Côté-femmes edition with modern French spelling and punctuation is incomplete; for example, it omits Bourgeois’s account of how she became a midwife. Nor does it correct misprints in the original French, such as where the word âme (soul) is printed instead of aîne (groin). See O’Hara 72–3.

⁴ There were gradations of prestige within the ranks of the nobility, and of course, among the commoners. A well-off middle-class family would have more status than a poor one; the provincial nobility lacked the prestige and status of their cousins in Paris and Versailles. In the sixteenth century, King François I began selling off government positions to increase the size of the royal treasury; in exchange, the buyers would be ennobled and could pass the position or office down to their descendants. This created a second-tier status of nobles called the nobility of the robe or gown, in reference to judges’ robes.

⁵ For a vaginal fumigation, a woman would stand over a fumigation pot, the idea being that the aromatic smoke coming from the heated wine and herbs would, depending on the herbs, cleanse the womb or draw it back down into place. This steaming or fumigation is not recommended by gynecologists today, despite the advice once given by actor Gwyneth Paltrow on her website goop.com. https://drjengunter.com/2015/01/27/gwyneth-paltrow-says-steam-your-vagina-an-obgyn-says-dont/Accessed 15 Feb. 2015.

⁶ See; McTavish 99; Sheridan 73–78, for more on the contrast between these two accounts.

⁷ For a fuller discussion of infertility in Bourgeois’s work, see Worth-Stylianou’s essay in this issue.

⁸ The Thrésor de santé was one of the primary sources for the “Glossary of Materia Medica” in Bourgeois 2017.

⁹ Blood and yellow bile also corresponded to heat and dryness. The other two humors and their associated temperaments were phlegm (phlegmatic) and black bile (melancholic); these were considered cold and wet humors. See Klairmont Lingo, “Editor’s Introduction,” 58–63, for an overview of Hippocratic-Galenic humoral theory. Humoral theory was exactly that, a theory; even so, it “remained influential … well into the eighteenth century” (Lindemann 13); it “endured because it was pliant and because its adherents were clever in weaving seemingly contradictory ideas and discoveries into its fabric” (87).

¹⁰ McClive concludes: “The assumption, which many early modern historians and literary scholars have made, both implicitly and explicitly, that Leviticus was used to justify broader misogynist attitudes toward menstruating women in elite and popular theological and medical circles, is unfounded” (26).

¹¹ Lysol was also implicitly and explicitly recommended as an ingredient in contraceptive douches, sometimes with fatal results. See Andrea Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America, 160; 170–72.

¹² In early modern France, “Parlement” was not a legislative body but an appellate court that was also charged with registering royal edicts (sometimes, they refused to register them). The Parlement de Paris was the most important, compared to the regional parlements.

¹³ The performative aspect, the possibility that she also might have seen it necessary to display such feeling in her book, does not negate the authenticity of any feeling of compassion, pity, or duty.

¹⁴ See also Klairmont Lingo, “Editor’s Introduction” 65, for an overview of reproductive anatomy from an early modern medical viewpoint, especially where “seeds” are concerned.

¹⁵ Bourgeois also refers to the placenta as a masse or “mass” and as the gros or “thick part” of the afterbirth. Indeed, “placenta” and “afterbirth” are not necessarily synonymous. Bourgeois typically uses arrière-faix to refer to the placenta together with the fetal membranes. These membranes re the chorion, the allantois, and the amnion, along with the umbilical cord. Arrière-faix translates more accurately to “after-burden” rather than “afterbirth,” and is attested in English as early as 1450. This designation of the afterbirth as a burden might sound to modern ears like a way of expressing sympathy for the parturient in that a burden can be a nuisance, but we should remember that a burden also simply means a load, a thing that is carried, as well as a duty or responsibility.