Plots, Patterns, and Challenges to Gender Ideology in Gomez and Sade

Author(s): William F. Edmiston

Source: The French Review, Vol. 73, No. 3 (Feb., 2000), pp. 463-474
Published by: American Association of Teachers of French
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THE FRENCHREVIEW,Vol. 73, No. 3, February 2000 Printed in U.S.A.

Plots, Patterns,and
Challenges to Gender
Ideology in Gomez and Sade
by WilliamF. Edmiston

PLOT, SAYS PETER BROOKS, is "a structuring operation peculiar to those

messages that are developed through temporal succession," a way of or-
ganizing the story elements in order to help us make sense of them (10).
A storyteller chooses and presents elements that serve to organize the
narrative. If I begin by telling you I have lost my keys, and then proceed
to give you details of my evening meal and other events of my day, you
are likely to ask me eventually about my keys, whether or not I have
found them and what consequences have ensued. As narrator I have set
up your expectations by creating what D. A. Miller calls a "narratable"
situation: "the instances of disequilibrium, suspense, and general insuffi-
ciency from which a given narrative appears to rise." These "various in-
citements to narrative" will lead eventually to the "nonnarratable" state
of quiescence and stability that is presumed to exist before the beginning
of a narrative and which is supposedly recovered at the end (ix).1Narra-
tive, in other words, is a forward-moving impulse that tends to keep it-
self going, whereas plot implies an ending and requires closure. Nar-
rative closure is, of course, a pretense. The final disposition of my keys is
an artificially stable and fulfilled closure, but it remains nonetheless a fit-
ting and expected ending to a story that I have organized by mentioning
the keys in the first place and creating a disequilibrium.
Story plots, however, are not simply organizing structures. They are
also intentional structures. Plot can be a concerted plan for the accom-
plishment of some purpose in the fictional world. The word "plot" is
thus related to "plotting" (through the French complot), a design that is
goal-oriented and forward-moving (Brooks 12). In this sense, the notion
of narrative "plot" can be related to ideological values. Brooks states that
the traditional novel conceives plot as a condition of deviance and abnor-
mality: "Deviance is the very condition for life to be 'narratable': the state
of normality is devoid of interest, energy, and the possibility for narra-
tion. In between a beginning prior to plot and an end beyond plot, the
middle-the plotted text-has been in a state of error: wandering and
misinterpretation" (139). Brooks's terminology-deviance, abnormality,
463
464 FRENCH REVIEW

error-already implies an ideological stance. Plot is often schematized as

the movement from a prohibited desire in the beginning of a narrative to
a legitimate one in the end.
In her ground-breaking Poetic Closure,BarbaraHerrnstein Smith showed
that allusions to any of the "natural"stopping-places of our lives and expe-
riences-sleep, death, winter, and so forth-tend to give closural force
when they appear as terminal features of a poem (102). As Armine Mor-
timer and others have shown, marriage represents one of these classic
stopping-places for women in eighteenth-century narrative fiction, and
one of the most recognizable of terminal conventions. The closural force of
marriage is partly intertextual-many readers, perhaps most, expect to
find what they have found before in other stories. Marriage is also one of
the more ideological forms of closure in that it constitutes a gendered view
of the world and of a woman's proper fate. Marriage, like death, appears
to hold no narrative future and thus offers both a structural and an inten-
tional form of narrative closure, a state of recovered stability. Nancy K.
Miller uses the term "repro-narrativity" to designate a fictional plot that
heads toward and ends with marriage, "the presumption of heterosexual
self-replication that makes for the naturalization of family plots" (34).2 The
fictional model is the heterosexual and monogamous couple, which repre-
sents the foundation of the family and which guarantees its continuity.
Sometimes, however, such an ending does not match the narrative that
precedes and supposedly prepares it, with the result that readers may
reach diverse judgments about its success or failure. Barbara Smith and
Marianna Torgovnick agree that some authors confront their audience
with endings that deliberately thwart reader expectations in order to
achieve desired effects (Smith 233; Torgovnick 18). In this essay I propose
to look closely at two short eighteenth-century French narratives, one
penned by a woman and the other by a man. Both texts feature a promi-
nent female character whose refusal of the family and marriage as her
fate in life constitutes the initial unstable element, the motivated impulse
of the plot (and I use the term "motivated" advisedly, as I will explain).
Both women are rich and without family, a nonnegligible detail in that it
frees them from the usual constraints and allows them to make decisions
concerning their own marital status.3 The first text is "L'Amour plus fort
que la nature" by Madeleine de Gomez, an early tale from her Cent Nou-
velles nouvelles, published in 1732. The second is "Augustine de Ville-
blanche" by the Marquis de Sade, written in 1787 or 1788 but not
published until 1926. Gomez's works-and this is the only clue we have
to the author's intentions-give no indication that she opposed the insti-
tution of marriage, whereas Sade's works give every indication that he
did. Each writer has created a heroine who resists the dominant expecta-
tions of eighteenth-century gender ideology. Each text ends traditionally,
however, with a marriage, which provides closural force while failing to
satisfy reader expectations.
GENDER ROLES IN GOMEZ AND SADE 465

"L'Amour plus fort que la nature" is the story of a young woman who
desires to remain single in order to be free of obligation to obedience and
fidelity, and who refuses marriage even to legitimize her child. The young
woman, Zelonide, is in love with a young man, Timante, and they are both
opposed to the institution of marriage in the name of freedom. When
Zelonide becomes pregnant, she retires to a country estate to give birth to
a daughter. Timante remains in the city and falls in love with another
young woman, Herminie, who, by the way, is also rich and orphaned.
Zelonide, angry and spiteful over this new attachment that seems headed
toward marriage, decides to send her infant daughter back to the child's
father in the city. Meanwhile, Timante falls gravely ill, and the priests
who attend him make him promise to marry Zelonide and legitimize his
daughter if he survives his illness. Timante agrees and makes this promise
because, we are told, he is in no position to argue. He does recover, and
despite his great love for Herminie, he tries to fulfill his duty by propos-
ing marriage to Zelonide. His initiative is rejected by Zelonide, however,
who maintains she has never loved him and is no less hostile to marriage
now than before. She repudiates her daughter and returns to the country.
Timante marries Herminie, who agrees to adopt the child as her own. Pre-
sumably, they live happily ever after.
An early dichotomy is set up between love and marriage. Timante's
friends (who are men) try to persuade him to marry:
Ses amis qui le pressaient quelquefois de se marier lui repr6sentaientinu-
tilement qu'il n'Wtaitpas n6cessaire pour vivre heureux que l'amour ac-
compagnat l'hymen: que le premier n'Wtaitque pour les plaisirs, et l'autre
pour la raison; et que cette derniere etait suffisante pour se choisir une
compagne aimable, et de qui les biens unis avec les siens pussent lui faire
mener une vie aussi douce qu'opulente.(152;my emphasis)
Marriage is clearly a financial matter for these young men, as well as an
obligation. "Reason" here means a societal duty to preserve property and
to maintain it within the paternal line. Timante rejects these arguments
and remains on the side of "love" and the pleasures of independence.
Zelonide, a woman in control of her own property, views the dichotomy
quite differently. A noble and wealthy orphan, she falls outside the grasp
of the patriarchal order. Described as an enemy of all constraints, she re-
fuses to submit to the laws of marriage: love for her would be as unpleas-
ant as marriage if servitude were involved. Zelonide's indulgence in love
without the societal duty of marriage is the prohibited desire that sets the
plot into motion. We are told that her words and her behavior would
have frightened anyone other than Timante. Clearly, the narrator (if not
the author) views her as deviant and refers to her "desordre des moeurs"
(155). When Zelonide becomes pregnant and gives birth, the child is
called "la conclusion du desordre de la mare" and "la preuve de son peu
de conduite" (155).
A second dichotomy, one between two types of love, occurs when
466 FRENCHREVIEW
Timante is smitten by Herminie: "enfin l'amour raisonnable, l'amour
epure, l'amour veritable et discret chassa de son coeur l'amour incon-
stant, volage et libertin, dont il avait 't6 si longtemps l'esclave" (157).
There seems to be little doubt that this second type of love is valorized by
the narrator. After the birth of the child, the important dichotomy of the
title comes into play. Whereas "love" consistently designates the passion-
ate, sexual attraction of one individual to another, "nature" undergoes
some semantic slippage in this text. At first it means parental attachment
to children, the "voice of blood," as it were. Timante receives his infant
daughter with joy, and he is thrilled about being a father. His new love
for Herminie "ne fit aucun tort aux mouvements de la nature" (163).
Love and nature in this sense thus seem to be compatible.
However, Herminie fears they are not compatible. She is worried be-
cause the presence of the child has established a family, a natural tie that
normally binds a couple together. She views the child as a threat to her
love for Timante, and she tells him: "Le gage que [Zelonide] a de votre
amour lui donne de grands droits sur vous" (162). Herminie fears that
nature will prove stronger than love, that Zelonide will reclaim her
rights, for the honor of the family and for the welfare of the child. Gradu-
ally the term "nature" becomes associated with religion and respectabili-
ty, with a need for Timante to legitimize his union, a socially-oriented
duty to marry the mother of his daughter in order to give the child an
honorable status and to assure her a good reputation: "Persecute par
l'amour et par la nature, il ne savait a qui des deux livrer son coeur. Pour
effacer a sa fille la tache d'une malheureuse naissance, il fallait epouser
une femme qu'il n'aimait plus, et qu'il ne pouvait estimer" (167). Torn
between his desire for Herminie and his duty toward his child, Timante
feels persecuted by love and by nature-instead of by religion, whose
ministers have reinforced this sense of societal duty toward the child and
its mother. Timante regrets that his honor and his conscience have been
attached to a union with Zelonide. The third dichotomy-love versus na-
ture-proves to be identical to the first and second-love versus mar-
riage, and libertine love versus rational love. All three involve a classic
struggle between passion and societal duty.
When Timante finally proposes marriage, Zelonide reacts with outrage:
"Que voulez-vous dire de mariage, de gage d'amour, et de fille, a laquel-
le il faut donner un Otat? Votre maladie vous a-t-elle 6te le jugement?"
(173). In the final sentence the narrator states that love in Herminie was
stronger than nature was in Zelonide, a situation that led the former to
declare herself to be the mother of the child, while the latter allowed the
voice of blood to be destroyed by vengeance and vice. The former ac-
cepts the social and economic order while the latter rejects it. Despite the
title, however, the battle between love and nature is never really put to
the test in the hero. Timante is finally not forced to choose between the
woman he loves and the child he has fathered. He chooses "nature" and
GENDER ROLES IN GOMEZ AND SADE 467

tries to do his prescribed duty, but Zelonide's rejection allows him to re-
turn to his true love and to safeguard his daughter's reputation as well. It
is never really love and nature that are at odds, but rather marriage and
acceptance of the family versus rejection of the patriarchal order, and the
conflict is embodied in the two female characters.
The story ends with a return to the familiar pattern of legitimate desire.
Can there be any doubt that this rehabilitation of marriage is the object of
the plot and of the plotting of this text? On an organizational level, love
and nature are set in opposition to one another and then reconciled; both
are legitimized by a marriage that satisfies the demands of affection and
those of societal duty. The presence of three principals in the plot (Zelo-
nide, Timante, and Herminie) requires the exclusion of one principal in
order to form a couple. Timante is converted to the idea of marriage, and
Zelonide simply disappears. On an intentional level, the author's message
appears to be straightforward. Zelonide remains constant in her aversion
toward marriage and in her scorn for the legitimate status of her child, but
Gomez's text presents this independent woman only to condemn her. The
narrator repeatedly voices disapproval of her character and of her con-
duct, while Timante views his earlier condemnation of marriage as one of
the errors of youth. Marriage thus provides an organizational resolution
to the dichotomy between love and nature, and at the same time allows
closure within the dominant ideological framework.
According to the terminology of Gerard Genette, narrative actions are
verisimilar and appear true-to-life when they conform to public opinion;
or, they may be motivated and have the appearance of causality; or they
may be arbitrary, when no explanation is provided. Genette gives three
one-sentence examples of his typology of narratives: 1. the verisimilar,
which requires no motivation: "La marquise demanda sa voiture et alla
se promener"; 2. the motivated narrative: "La marquise demanda sa
voiture et se mit au lit, car elle etait fort capricieuse"; 3. the arbitrary, for
which no motivation is given: "La marquise demanda sa voiture et se
mit au lit" (98-99). The first type, the verisimilar or realistic, is closely
identified with an implicit ideology, which functions silently and with-
out commentary.
Gomez's text requires no explanation to justify marriage and a concern
for social stability. According to Shirley Jones-Day, Gomez's texts view
marriage as a means of achieving social integration for women, and they
always reflect the dominant ideology.4 Zelonide's hostility toward mar-
riage, however, must be motivated: it is an example of what Genette calls
"extravagant" (Brooks would say "deviant"), and it is characterized by
its singularity.5 It must be explained by the character's aversion to servi-
tude. Further, this aversion is given the unusual possibility of realization
because of the character's economic independence. It is restricted to one
character and overtly condemned by the narrator. Yet we might ask, is
the rhetorical message of this text really so clear? Why does it seek to
468 FRENCHREVIEW

prove that love is stronger than nature? The very opposition of the terms
is curious, since one term does not normally exclude the other, and the
dichotomy implies the unusual view that love is unnatural. Passion in
the story is shown to be, by turns, stronger than and weaker than
parental ties to children, concern for respectability and religion, and re-
sponsibility toward the child's other biological parent. Passion, nature,
and societal duty all had both positive and negative connotations in the
eighteenth century. The message seems a bit muddled, and this slippage
casts some doubt on the success of the text's rhetorical strategy. But let us
go on.
"Augustine de Villeblanche, ou le stratageme de l'amour" is a shorter
text with a much thinner plot, more of a "conte" than a "nouvelle."6 It is
the story of a beautiful young woman who refuses heterosexual marriage
and rebuffs all male advances, because of her sexual interest in women.
Augustine is rich, an only child, and an orphan. At age 20 she says she
needs no permission to marry and is master of her property. Once again,
she falls outside of male genealogies, which makes her a subversive char-
acter. During carnival time, Augustine disguises herself as a man and at-
tends social functions in order to seduce women. A young man named
Franville falls madly in love with Augustine and, fully aware of her pro-
clivities, determines to find a way to seduce her. He disguises himself as
a woman and attends a masked ball at which he knows Augustine will
be present. When Augustine sees Franville, whom she supposes to be a
beautiful young woman, she is immediately smitten. Franville tells Au-
gustine that "she" is engaged to be married. Augustine denigrates mar-
riage and tries to sour Franville on the idea. She persuades Franville to
accompany her and leads "her" away to an isolated room, a space de-
signed for seduction. Augustine perfectly assumes the role of male se-
ducer, while Franville feigns that of feminine resistance. Augustine's
attempted seduction of Franville uncovers the biological truth. While in
most comic disguises of sex, closure is possible once the true sex is re-
vealed, in Sade's text we are left with the problem of sexuality. When his
male identity is revealed, Franville proceeds with another kind of ruse:
he is in fact a man, but he claims to be in disguise because he is seeking
to seduce other men, and he feigns disgust upon learning that Augustine
is a woman. They appear to be, in fact, two birds of a feather, each at-
tracted to his/her own sex and repelled by the other, and each annoyed
to learn the other's true identity:

- Comment, vous etes femme, et vous d6testez les hommes?

- Oui, et cela par la meme raison que vous etes homme et que vous ab-
horrez les femmes.
- La rencontre est unique, voila tout ce qu'on peut dire.
- Elle est fort triste pour moi, dit Augustine avec tous les symptames
de l'humeur la plus marqu6e.
GENDER ROLES IN GOMEZ AND SADE 469

- En verite, mademoiselle, elle est encore plus fastidieuse pour moi, dit
aigrement Franville,me voila souille pour trois semaines. (Sade 14: 163)
The verbal sparring continues. After a spirited dialogue in which each
character tries to justify his/her preferences, each agrees to make a sacri-
fice for the other. Then Franville confesses his ruse and professes his
love, Augustine forgives him, and they are married within the week.
It seems fair to say that the reader is not well prepared for this "matri-
monium ex machina." The text begins, as many of Sade's fictions do,
with a rather long-winded discourse on a particular aspect of morality-
in this case, a justification of desire for the same sex and a defense of men
and women who experience such desire.7 This discourse is spoken by the
heroine. Augustine asserts, amid kisses bestowed upon an unnamed fe-
male friend, that this "caprice," this "penchant," this "goaft"is as much a
product of nature as any other desire, and should therefore not be criti-
cized or punished. The narrator intervenes to tell us that Augustine's ha-
tred of men and repugnance for marriage are largely due to this caprice,
of which she has just delivered an apology. Once again, the heroine's re-
fusal of the family is motivated in the text because of its singularity. It is
deviant, in all senses of the word.
Next we are introduced to Franville, an individual who, if not sexually
ambivalent, is at least physically ambiguous. Franville is described as
having almost no beard, a very pretty figure,
les traits les plus d6licats, les plus beaux cheveux du monde; quand on
l'habillait en fille, il 6tait si bien dans ce costume qu'il trompait toujours
les deux sexes, et qu'il avait souvent regu, des uns en s'6garant, des
autres bien stirs de leur fait, une foule de declarations si precises, qu'il
aurait pu dans le meme jour devenir l'Antinoiis de quelque Adrien ou
l'Adonis de quelque Psyche. (160)
Thus, by the time the action of the story is set up, we seem to be very far
indeed from heterosexual, monogamous closure. There is a good deal of
gender-bending in this text, and the prohibited desire that will propel the
narrative is quite obvious.
For the remainder of the text, we read an extended conversation. First,
there is a dialogue between two individuals, each of whom is disguised
as the other sex, each sexually attracted to the other, but only one of
whom (the woman) is fooled by the disguise. Next, the disguises disap-
pear and both characters identify themselves as homosexual and claim
repugnance toward the other, while only one (the woman) is telling the
truth. Then, both characters admit that they have never had a sexual rela-
tion with the other sex: their curiosity is piqued, which helps to prompt
them toward one another. Finally, all pretenses are dropped.
Before the resolution of the plot, however, we discover a change in mo-
tivation that provides a hint as to the outcome. The plot of the story
seems to turn on the following exchange:
470 FRENCH REVIEW

- Oui, vous avez raison, dit Augustine ... car je crains bien que cette
funeste rencontre ne me coGltele bonheur de ma vie.
- Comment, vous n'etes donc pas bien sfire de vos sentiments?
- Je l' tais hier.
- Ah! vous ne tenez pas a vos maximes. (165)
Is the heroine's desire, in fact, a matter of feelings or one of principles?
Near the end of the tale, Augustine speaks of female fears of male con-
quest. She admits that women seek pleasure from each other to avoid
giving themselves to a sex that always seeks to dominate them. Male tri-
umph in love, she asserts, always means female defeat. This assertion
comes as a surprise, a new organizational element and an unforeseen
motivation. Augustine's inclination now seems to result less from her
"nature" than from a political stance she has adopted, and this new moti-
vation is in contradiction with what the narrator has told us about her
proclivities. She admits to a desire to convert Franville to her way of
thinking about women, but Franville needs little converting. At the end
of the story, it is Augustine who converts to a new sexuality and who re-
nounces her errors. Nature has made men and women for each other, she
says, and nature wins out in the end:
"Va, je renonce avec joie pour te plaire a des erreurs oui la vanite nous
entraine presque aussi souvent que nos gocits. Je le sens, la nature l'em-
porte, je l'6touffais par des travers que j'abhorrea pr6sent de toute mon
ame; on ne r6siste point a son empire, elle ne nous a cre6es que pour
vous, elle ne vous forma que pour nous; suivons ses lois, c'est par l'or-
gane de l'amour meme qu'elle me les inspire aujourd'hui, elles ne m'en
deviendront que plus sacrdes."(167)

Clearly, Augustine has given in to a concept of nature that is quite differ-

ent from the one she had described at the opening of the tale. She has be-
come a spokeswoman of the dominant gender ideology of eighteenth-
century French society. The passage to legitimate desire is complete, and
her conversion apparently requires no motivation because it is buttressed
by ideology.
The "stratageme de l'amour" of the title clearly refers to male hetero-
sexual desire, which ultimately results in a victory over feminine resis-
tance. The title of this story might also be "L'Amour plus fort que la
nature," if love implies the road to marriage while nature is the well-
known Sadean concept, that which admits all "caprices," homosexual
and otherwise. Conversely, Sade's tale might be called "La Nature plus
forte que l'amour," if love means indiscriminate physical desire whereas
nature has biological reproduction as its telos. In either case, the winner
in this text is marriage and the family, although once again the semantic
slippage tends to destabilize its message. The apparent acquiescence to
the maintenance of the socioeconomic order is quite surprising in a text
by Sade, for surely no eighteenth-century French author was more radi-
cal in his critique of gender roles. Although the marriage of Augustine
GENDER ROLES IN GOMEZ AND SADE 471

provides resolution on the organizational level, the intentional level

seems too facile and too neatly resolved. Unlike Gomez's narrator, Sade's
narrator amply justifies Augustine's challenge to gender ideology. More
than just motivated, her refusal of marriage is boldly defended. Her con-
version to marriage, however, is not motivated at all, and it appears arbi-
trary and contrived to many modern readers.
Both Gomez's text and that of Sade foreground a female character who
challenges the social order by refusing marriage and the family. Gomez's
heroine is denounced by the narrator and supplanted by another female
character who accepts marriage and motherhood with all their trappings,
while Sade's heroine is seduced-in the etymological sense, "led away"
from her forbidden desire-and converted to the family. They are extra-
ordinary fictional women who dare to refuse the quintessential feminine
destiny in eighteenth-century France. Their creators, however, chose clas-
sical, metaphoric closure for their tales. Why does the family triumph in
the end, and what does this form of closure signify?
First, marriage must triumph if it is set up as an organizational device
of the plot. Both female characters, Zelonide and Augustine, are defined
for the reader primarily as a function of their resistance to marriage (and
in the case of Augustine, resistance even to the male sex). Resistance to
marriage is similar to the loss of one's keys: each is set up as an unstable
situation, and each must be overcome in order for closure to take place. If
plot means a transition over time from an unstable and narratable state
or situation to a fulfilled and nonnarratable one, then the reader expects
to see, in the course of these narratives, such resistance removed, dis-
placed, or overcome. Deviance must be cured: the recalcitrant Zelonide
displaced by the docile Herminie, the homosexual Augustine converted
to heterosexual monogamy. Second, marriage triumphs because of plot
as intentional structure, because of ideological plotting. Here it becomes
obvious that the organizational structure already contains traces of the
intentional structure. While everyone will understand that I want to find
my keys, not everyone will agree that a woman should want to get mar-
ried. Establishment of the family is an ideological goal masquerading as
an aesthetic goal of narrative closure.
Marriage in the eighteenth century was the common biographical pat-
tern for women. Female characters like Zelonide and Augustine, who
challenge the social order by refusing to found a family, are not usually
allowed to realize that challenge. Either women conform and are recon-
ciled with the institution, or they are outcast. Women must marry or be
eliminated, so that the social order will be upheld. As Nancy Miller
states: "In the imaginary universe of the novel, there is no room for the
exceptional woman who calls into question the ground rules of the oldest
game in the world. That may well be the message of the medium"
(158-59). The legitimate desire for stability, for closure, is blocked by
feminine characters who resist legitimacy and who thus represent the
472 FRENCH REVIEW

prohibited desire. This blocking, which will require a considerable

amount of motivation because it goes against the prevailing ideology,
must be removed, whereas the conversion to marriage requires no moti-
vation at all. The narrative concept of plot in the eighteenth century
seems to be overdetermined by the cultural imperative of family and the
reproductive process, a continuity of which the heterosexual and monog-
amous couple is the guarantee.
Elizabeth J. MacArthur states that "the most metaphoric novelistic
endings, such as death and marriage, may give the reader the satisfac-
tion of reaching the termination of plot, without resolving the larger is-
sues raised by the work" (30). Marriage-any marriage-can give clo-
sure to a story, even when other themes have not been fully resolved.
Marriage "cures" divergence from the norm and reaffirms the social
order, but it is possible to question whether or not the author's ideologi-
cal goals have been met. Both of these texts may in fact subvert the fami-
ly and undermine the dominant gender ideology while appearing to cel-
ebrate it as triumphant. For the modern reader, at least, both stories
contain an odd sort of ideological failure at the end. Though the overtly
ideological discourse of Gomez leads one to expect a complete closure,
there is curiously a certain openness at the end of her story. Zelonide,
who rejects marriage and motherhood, is allowed to escape, not exactly
triumphant but certainly not vanquished. She is not punished for her re-
jection of the prevailing ideology. A woman has refused the family and
has lived to tell about it. She neither dies nor marries nor enters a con-
vent, but simply goes away, leaves the city, and remains unmarried. She
too might well live happily ever after, like Timante and Herminie, de-
spite her extravagant beliefs. In Sade's text, the initial counterideological
discourse creates an unfamiliar set of expectations and leads us to pre-
dict a different and open-ended text. Our expectations are disappointed,
it is true, yet Sade's text seems to be plotting something else, allowing us
to perceive an intention that is not borne out by the outcome. Sade sets
up an iconoclastic situation that threatens the prevailing ideology but
does not allow it to follow through. The unexpected conclusion to this
tale might be intended to expose to ridicule (and to call into question)
the conventional, heterosexual "happily-ever-after" closural paradigm
that is so prevalent in fiction.
Genette affirms that the difference between the verisimilar and the ar-
bitrary is entirely dependent on ideology and subject to variable judg-
ment. What appears realistic and lifelike to a given reader has to do quite
simply with that reader's expectations and beliefs. The realistic and the
arbitrary are thus relative terms. I contend that these texts call the con-
ventional feminine plot into question, despite their classical closure.
Gomez concludes with the marriage pattern but leaves an organizational
element unstable, open-ended, deviant, narratable. Sade concludes with
GENDER ROLES IN GOMEZ AND SADE 473

the familiar pattern, perhaps in order to expose its artificiality, since all
intentional elements seem to be pointed in a different direction. The end-
ing of Gomez's tale may be more believable than that of Sade, but it is
surely more revolutionary in that it poses a more serious threat to the so-
cial order. If these stories are unsettling, it is because they challenge the
pattern of plots. The endings of both tales-Zelonide's exclusion and Au-
gustine's conversion-might appeal to readers who find comfort in the
reassuring conclusion of marriage. If they appear unsatisfactory to mod-
ern readers, it is surely because many of us are skeptical of marriage as a
woman's only plot in life.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA

Notes

'Brooks also uses the term "narratability": "For plot starts (or must give the illusion of
starting) from that moment at which story, or 'life,' is stimulated from quiescence into a
state of narratability, into a tension, a kind of irritation, which demands narration" (103).
2Nancy Miller uses the term slightly differently from Michael Warner, who defines
"repro-narrativity" as "the notion that our lives are somehow made more meaningful by
being embedded in a narrative of generational succession" (Warner 7).
3Female characters especially must be freed from family constraints in order to act inde-
pendently in the world of fictional experience. Otherwise, no experimentation is possible.
4Jones-Day states that the stories of the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles tend to criticize marriage
only when material interests of the family oppose romantic idealism and claims to individ-
ual happiness (84-87). This view of marriage is quite common in eighteenth-century French
fiction and drama.
5Genette borrows his term "extravagant" from Bussy-Rabutin's criticism of the "confes-
sion" scene in La Princesse de Cleves, which is worth quoting: "l'aveu de Mme de Cleves a
son mari est extravagant, et ne se peut dire que dans une histoire veritable; mais quand on
en fait une a plaisir, il est ridicule de donner a son h6roine un sentiment si extraordinaire"
(Lafayette 295).
6This text has been anthologized and translated into English. Although Gilbert Lely ranks
it as one of Sade's five best short stories (Sade 2: 524-25), it has received virtually no critical
attention.
7For further discussion of Sade's treatment of homosexuality, see William F. Edmiston,
"Nature, Sodomy, and Semantics in Sade's La Philosophie dans le boudoir," and "Shifting
Ground: Sade, Same-Sex Desire, and the One-, Two-, and Three-Sex Models."

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