Mariamne l’Hasmonéenne selon Madeleine de Scudéry : réécriture philogyne d’une effrontée

Abstract

Madeleine de Scudéry’s own version of Mariamne in the first volume of The Illustrious Women, or the Heroic Orations (1642) asserts the heroine’s virulent eloquence by legitimizing it. According to Scudéry, Mariamne’s desobedience far from proves the moral faltering of a woman who, overcome by hatred for her husband, forgot her place and gave into her impulses. Instead, her virulence demonstrates the nobility and the reliability or her character. Since Mariamne is the last direct heiress of the Maccabees, her passionate revolt against Herod’s tyranny is her duty as queen, not a sign of her unruliness. My work analyses the rhetoric and stylistic strategies that Scudéry mobilizes to consecrate Mariamne’s relentless denouncing of Herod’s abuses of power. I argue that Scudéry invests irony with an astonishing function. By turning a simple figure of speech into an enunciative modality, Scudéry magnifies the three rhetorical appeals: ethos, logos, and pathos. Scudéry seeks to canonize Mariamne’s “learned disparagement” of Herod. She moves female eloquence away from pure pathos and bases it upon logical reasonings, without sacrificing both Mariamne’s proud ethos and vehement elocutio. Finally, I show how Scudéry restores the heroine’s authority and agency as a sovereign in the midst of a tense policital and intimate context.

Keywords

• Madeleine de Scudéry
• rhetoric
• rewriting
• Les Femmes illustres
• Mariamne
• philogyny