Ninon de Lenclos, esprit fort dans la compagnie des hommes ou de la difficulté de concevoir la maître de philosophie
Abstract
After Nicolas-André Monsiau’s painting (1810) showing Ninon de Lenclos, amongst a group of male spectators, who listens to Molière as he reads his Tartuffe, we want to follow the historiographical construction of a woman as a « freethinker ». Ninon de Lenclos, the famous xviith Century’s female courtesan, is one of the rare available exemples of this kind of character. Well-known as a freethinker form the begining of the xxth Century, she also inherits the historiographical construction the xviiith produced about her. During the xviiith Century, indeed, Ninon was conceived as a reasonable woman, surrounded by illustrious men helping her to spread, during the Enlightment, the Renaissance’s unbelievers’ wisdom. But as she had never been presented as a person who is able to own or transmit an autonomous culture, nevertheless, the figure of Aspasie, the female Pericles’master of philosophy, was always recalled by the historiography as a possible, but dangerous, historical fiction. However, if Ninon de Lenclos was known as a person who knows how to build a mixed sociability where it was possible to share and partake, with male partners, frienship, body’s pleasures and spiritual open enjoyments — wit and flesh —, this peculiar sociability was unthinkable as feminine and had to be conceived as a form of masculinity : that’s why Ninon de Lenclos, single woman amongst many men, appears as a sort of « other » male.
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