1 Faking It: Affect and Gender in the Essais Katherine Ibbett In ...

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Faking It: Affect and Gender in the Essais

Katherine Ibbett

In most accounts today, affect is unplanned; it happens without premeditation; it makes no

demand on the will. Seen in such a way, affect figures a form of feeling outside conscious

reflection, or outside intention; it is often a strike against the linguistic turn, marking an attempt

to think – or rather to feel but to know that feeling as another form of knowledge – outside of

language. This affect’s bodily surprise figures a kind of authenticity.1 At times Montaigne’s

essays into feeling, with their reach after something in constant and fleeting movement, seem to

yearn for such an immediate affective punch. This imagined affective authenticity also lies

behind a series of concerned explorations of emotional behaviors understood to counterfeit

affective truth, and concerns about the unreliability of those who engage in them. Where the

Essais locate “true” and evident affect in Montaigne’s mourned friendship with La Boétie, a

“force inexplicable et fatale,” they often return to mourning, and chiefly to the mourning of

women for their husbands, as the site of a fake emotion.2 If Montaigne’s true emotion for the

dead man figures the force of their friendship, the various widows whose emotions are

scrutinized throughout the Essais often point to the inadequacy or impossibility of anything

approaching friendship within marriage. But they also, in their failings, figure a sort of theorizing

1 See, for example, Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).

2 Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais ed. Pierre Villey and V. L. Saulnier (Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France, 1999), I, 28, 188. Further references are to this edition.

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of emotion; the gulf that separates female fake mourning from masculine true functions as a gap

that allows us to read the flickers of a Montaignian affect. What kind of affect theory emerges

when Montaigne tries to work out if women always fake it?

De trois bonnes femmes

I don’t use the term “faking it,” with its sexual implications, glibly, for the examples of the

mourning women return continually to a diverted figuration of sexual relations. In an early essay,

“De trois bonnes femmes,” Montaigne suggests that when it comes to the “devoirs de marriage”

the “volonté” of women means they have a hard time sticking to them (II, 35, 744): although this

essay is explicitly about mourning, it is chased by the memory of other failed forms of affect and

attention. Marital duties and marital bonds, Montaigne suggests, revolve around a particular

(mis)timing; in “De l’amitié,” if sexual attraction is “subject à accez et remises,” marriage is

equally liable to difficulty because women are not “assez ferme” to bear “un neud si pressé et si

durable” (I, 28, 186). In “De trois bonnes femmes,” if marriage should be “constamment douce,”

women seem too often to get the timing of it wrong, and to show their emotion for their

husbands only once the show is over: “En nostre siecle, elles reservent plus communéement à

estaller leurs bons offices et la vehemence de leur affection envers leurs maris perdus” (II, 35,

744): they show their love only in mourning them, proving therefore, Montaigne suggests archly,

that “elles ne les aiment que morts.” The terminology smacks of ceremonial: the mourning

women display their “offices,” a term that describes both the great functions of the civil state, but

also the liturgy said by the priest. In usurping such masculine rituals, the women pay untimely

homage to their own menfolk.

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Even this “tardif tesmoignage” is to be suspected: if they hide their affection from their

living husbands “pour maintenir un honneste respect,” Montaigne wonders how we can take

seriously the women’s show of woe in mourning. Instead of being “constamment douce,”

running a sweet continuum of affect in both life and death, these women’s emotions erupt; they

follow the wrong plotline. With no earlier evidence of their emotional commitment, their

vehement self-harm (“elles ont beau s’escheveler et esgratigner”) can only be regarded coolly;

Montaigne turns from such a vulgar display, and goes instead to seek evidence from the

household staff, “à l’oreille d’une femme de chamber,” on the state of their marriage. There’s

something bleakly comic in this picture, but it speaks real regret on Montaigne’s part, an

anticipatory fear of the way in which he might be mourned. It brings, too, a regret for the female

reader: if we are used to women’s emotional labor being disappeared, there is something equally

mournful in this moment of rendering it visible only to mock it. What might it have been like for

that arch-mourner Marie de Gournay to read this passage?

Montaigne’s suspicion of such mourning women is based partly on the noise they make:

the more they wail, the less real emotion they can be presumed to feel. But though women’s

bodies speak best when they are silent, Montaigne and his quoted male authorities line up a

formidable soundscape against them; Tacitus, among others, chimes in to tell us “jactantius

mœrent, quae minus dolent” [“They wail most noticeably who mourn least.”]3 In contrast to the

truth he has from the “oreille” of the domestics or from the voices of his most familiar friendly

books, Montaigne’s mourning wives sing a song of fakery, a “piteuse voix” that is given the lie

3 Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works trans. Donald Frame (Stanford: Stanford University

Press, 1958), 683.

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by their cheery complexion which speaks the truth: “c’est par-là qu’elle parle françois.” The

frank Frenchness of the truth-speaking body cuts through the overly familiar tropes of pathos.4

Montaigne characterizes these false women mourners as being of “ceremonieuse contenance” (II,

35, 745): their affect stands too much on ceremony to be understood as authentic.

Montaigne follows his karaoke mourners with three accounts of better women, “exemples

un peu autres,” including a neighbor of Pliny the Younger who arranged to die alongside her

husband, who so wanted him to die in her arms that she had them bound together “par le faux du

corps,” by the waist. This bundling of bodies puts the lie to the falsity of women’s mourning; the

truth of the body’s “faux” briefly redeems, even as an exception, the ceremonial counterfeit of

the general rule. The three good women of the essay are all, Montaigne insists, “tres-veritables”

(II, 35, 749), but they also point to a story about the difficult truth of emotion.5

Montaigne’s concern about a counterfeit mourning depends upon an interior/exterior

model of imagining emotion which is very familiar to us today, and which much work in affect

studies seeks to disrupt; he wants the women to mourn “au dehors comme au dedans” (II, 35,

4 On the early modern fear of false compassion, see Katherine Ibbett, Compassion’s Edge:

Fellow-Feeling and its Limits in Early Modern France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

Press, 2017), 175, 206, 229; on frankness and plain speaking imagined as French traits, see

Timothy Hampton, Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance

France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 2-5.

5 On this essay see especially Rosanna Gorris Camos, “Vertiges de Femmes, Vertiges de Mort:

‘De Trois Bonnes Femmes’ (II,35)” in Les Chapitres Oubliés des “Essais” de Montaigne, ed.

Philippe Desan (Paris: Champion, 2011), 201-24.

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744). The questioning of this affective interiority has been important to work in critical studies of

the emotions. Rei Terada, describing how emotion’s place in our understanding and questioning

of subjectivity, notes that “the ideology of emotion diagrams emotion as something lifted from a

depth to a surface,” giving rise to what she calls the “expressive hypothesis,” whereby expression

is assumed to be the emanation of emotion.6 In many Renaissance texts – think of Castiglione, or

Graciàn – the courtly or martial ideal is the reverse of that, where the inner is not lifted to the

surface but remains hidden in a willed inexpression which walls off the interior emotion from

exterior show: we could call this the inexpressive hypothesis. Throughout the Essais, Montaigne

frequently leans on that spatialized structure, but it crops up most often as a failure at moments

when an interior emotion fails to be hidden. His interest in the face, for instance, often traces an

unexpressive hypothesis which ends up being expressive despite itself: in “Divers evenements de

mesme conseil,” the inner/outer model fails when the prince sees the guilt shown on the face of a

plotter, who is advised that he would “empirer vostre marché d’essayer à le couvrir” (I, 24, 125).

But in “De trois bonnes femmes,” Montaigne’s use of the interior/exterior distinction breaks the

habit of Renaissance affective structures which urge courtly counterfeit: in contrast, he imagines

a distinction between them only to hanker for the true interior to be shown.

Gendering the Authentic

It’s not always the case, for Montaigne, that loud mourning indicates trickery. When men do it,

we are urged to not always disbelieve what we hear. In one (probably early) essay, “Comme

6 Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 2003), 11.

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nous pleurons et rions d’une mesme chose” Montaigne describes how men have mourned those

they have vanquished in battle. Seeing such “grand deuil” (I, 38, 233) we might well imagine

this to be fakery, but instead Montaigne tells us

Il ne faut pas s’escrier soudain:

Et cosi aven che l’animo ciascuna

Sua passion sotto el contrario manto

Ricopre, con la vista hor’ chiara hor bruna.

[And this it happens that each soul conceals,

Showing the opposite, now gay, now sad,

The passion that it genuinely feels.]7

The verse is from Petrarch; under the mantle of a borrowed language, Montaigne offers us a

possibility that this emotion is fake, but offers it to us only through negation – we must not cry

this. We must not make a noise about the noise of men.

This injunction not to follow a particular hermeneutic model for reading the passions is

repeated later in the essay: against Lucan’s accusation that Caesar’s tears on seeing the head of

Pompey were forced, Montaigne suggests that “il ne faut pas croire que cette contenance fut

toute fauce et contrefaicte.” Where the “ceremonieuse contenance” of the women is to be

discounted as false, concerning men Montaigne’s affect theory allows for greater contradictions:

7 Complete Works, trans. Frame, 209.

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this time against Petrarch, against Lucan, he looks away from affective authority and lets the

male mourners try out something else. Where “il ne faut pas croire” usually makes the request to

dig behind the mask, here Montaigne asks us to unbelieve in the authenticity of an interior

emotion and to imagine instead emotion as a difficult co-existence, a jostling of one thing

alongside the other where one uncomfortably and contingently takes precedence:

il faut considerer comme nos ames se trouvent souvent agitées de diverses passions. Et

tout ainsi qu’en nos corps ils disent qu’il y a une assemblée de diverses humeurs,

desquelles celle là est maistresse qui commande le plus ordinairement en nous, selon nos

complexions: aussi, en nos ames, bien qu’il y ait divers mouvemens qui l’agitent, si faut-

il qu’il y en ait un à qui le champ demeure. (I, 38, 234)

Here Montaigne does not take the humors to be the causes of what we would today call the

emotions (as scholars like Gail Kern Paster have suggested many early moderns did); rather, he

draws on the humoral body as an analogy for the model of the emotions (“mouvemens”) he lets

come briefly to prominence in the essay. These humoral-analogous movements are less

spatialized than temporalized; they move through the soul. Emotions are marked by layers of

temporal precisions: a B addition to the essay specifies “Qui pour me voir une mine tantost

froide, tantost amoureuse envers ma femme, estime que l’une ou l’autre soit feinte, il est un sot”

(I, 38, 235B). Emotion, like an essay, is continually subject to revision.8

8 Note that Descartes’s reflections on the affect of false mourning also turn around the marital

relation, but do not single out women as agents of falsehood. In distinguishing between interior

emotions and passions and wondering about what happens when the two meet and mix, he

describes how “lorsqu’un mari pleure sa femme morte, laquelle (ainsi qu’il arrive quelquefois) il

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Looking at Montaigne’s acceptance of his own changing marital “mine” alongside the

valorous mourning of Caesar, and countering it with the noisy sham of the mourning women at

the opening of “De trois bonnes femmes,” it is hard to escape the sense that here affective

authenticity is gendered. This concern about the falsity of women’s emotions should be central to

serait fâché de voir ressuscitée, il se peut faire que son cœur est serré par la tristesse que

l’appareil des funérailles et l’absence d’une personne à la conversation de laquelle il était

accoutumé excitent en lui ; et il se peut faire que quelques restes d’amour ou de pitié qui se

présentent à son imagination tirent de véritables larmes de ses yeux, nonobstant qu’il sente

cependant une joie secrète dans le plus intérieur de son âme, l’émotion de laquelle a tant de

pouvoir que la tristesse et les larmes qui l’accompagnent ne peuvent rien diminuer de sa force.”

René Descartes, Les Passions de l’âme ed. Geneviève Rodis-Lewis (Paris: Vrin, 1994), article

147. Descartes suggests that this affective structure is akin to that we go through at the theater,

where we can distinguish between an exterior passion (something that happens to us) and an

interior emotion (something that arises in us), a passage that has often been commented on in the

context of the passions and the stage: see especially Victoria Kahn, “Happy Tears: Baroque

Politics in Descartes’s Passions de l’âme,” in Politics and the Passions 1500-1800, eds. Victoria

Kahn, Neil Saccamano and Daniela Coli (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 93-110.

For another illuminating instance of intertextual feigned mourning, see Kate E. Tunstall, “A Case

in Transit: Reading Diderot (Reading Montaigne) Reading Augustine” in Montaigne in Transit:

Essays in Honour of Ian MacLean, ed. Neil Kenny, Richard Scholar, and Wes Williams (Oxford:

Legenda, 2016), 19-35.

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any feminist intellectual history keen to tackle the gendering of knowledge.9 Here I want to

follow a diversion from that strictly historical project, a diversion which returns us to the

problem of women’s noise as a way of thinking about the truth of (or truth in) marriage.

Renaissance Orgasmology

Montaigne’s archive of fake mourning signals a particular set of concerns perhaps

particularly operative within and around late sixteenth-century marriage, at a moment when

historians proffer examples and counterexamples for the changing habits and capacities of

marriage in western Europe. But it also sits curiously well alongside an area of interest to the

mid-twentieth century sexologist: fake orgasm. Faking it, Annamarie Jagose suggests, is a

historically embedded practice; she sees fake orgasm as “a twentieth-century sexual

invention…constructed as a problem, rather than an innovation.”10 If we place one version of the

feigned marital relation against another, we see how Montaigne comes to try out fake mourning

not as deception but rather as innovation.

Jagose’s commentary on “a widespread cultural narrative that aligns orgasm with truth

and fake orgasm with falsehood” (176) undoes, beautifully and acerbically, a particular set of

“familiar knowledges” about heterosexual relations (178). Jagose sets out the socio-

epistemological problem of the fake orgasm, “ideally neither acknowledged not recognized”

9 For such a project, see Rebecca Wilkin, Women, Imagination and the Search for Truth in Early

Modern France (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008).

10 Annamarie Jagose, Orgasmology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 189.

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(189). In seeking to account for something hoped not to happen, Jagose describes how “fake

orgasm’s archive is idiosyncratic and incomplete: a bunch of expert and folk talk,

recommendations and denunciations both…” (189): this archive is not far from the noisily

conversational citationality of Montaigne.

Jagose’s account of this archive describes how the projects of mid-century sexologists

like William Masters and Virginia Johnson “are intent on eradicating fake orgasm as a practice”;

their writing, imagined as something that both enables women to have better, truer orgasms, and

enables men to determine when they are being tricked, sets out to ensure “its cultural extinction”

(190). Does Montaigne’s essay seek to eliminate fake mourning? The essay is certainly an

experimental space. Yet across his larger archive, Montaigne seems to move from imagining the

fake as a practice to be reviled to considering it as an inventive technique; and in so doing,

arguably, he also comes to reflect on his own writing practice. Jagose calls for conceptualizing

the fake “outside the narrow logics in which it is customarily thought, outside, that is, the logics

of deceit (the exemplary male perspective) or dissatisfaction (the exemplary female one)” (205).

Montaigne’s commitment to undoing examples, I think, leads him to similarly think outside

these logics in an essay which begins, as it diverts itself from a more familiar narrative, to

respect the fake.

De la diversion

Montaigne returns to the question of fake mourning in a later essay, “De la diversion,” which

takes up, amongst other things, the ways in which we divert ourselves from a confrontation with

death. This essay famously begins by suggesting that the grief of mourning women should not be

opposed but rather distracted, in the way one gives a child a toy to distract them from a tantrum.

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Montaigne opens his essay by telling us “J’ay autrefois esté emploié à consoler une dame

vraiement affligée” – vraiement, he confirms, because most women’s mournings are “artificiels

et ceremonieux” (III, 4, 830): that rejected ceremony recalls the ceremonious countenance of the

earlier essay, and this opening observation certainly stays broadly within the same disciplinary

surveillance of women’s tendency to fake it.

But Montaigne’s innovative intervention itself also seems almost ceremonious: the

formulation “esté emploié” sets him to a task perhaps directed by another; a few lines later he

moves from his own experience to describe that of a doctor towards his patient; and after that, he

moves from the first person pronoun to the third, counselling his readers that in distracting their

women “vous gaignez credit à passer outre…vous vous coulez aux discours plus fermes et

propres à leur guerison” (831), before lurching back to “Moy, qui ne desirois principalement que

de piper l’assistance qui avoit les yeux sur moy…”: Montaigne is not “vraiement” motivated to

act for the woman’s affliction; rather, it is those watching him who compel him to act out of

artifice and ceremony, what he calls later “ce mesme service.” It is his task to bring forth the

correct emotion in the woman, and to perform such emotional labor for those watching. Already

the question of emotion’s real residence is complicated by this strange switchover of agency and

person, and the acknowledgment of the complicated social scripts within which emotion

operates.

Much of the criticism on this essay has focused on its counselling of a mindful distraction

faced with death, and on the writing strategy that emerges from such a slide.11 But for all the

11 See, for example, Lawrence D. Kritzman, “Montaigne's Death Sentences: Narrative and

Subjectivity in ‘De La Diversion’ (Essais 3.4),” in Distant Voices Still Heard: Contemporary

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essay’s insistence on the agility of thought (“nous pensons toujours ailleurs” interjects the B

edition, 834), it consistently figures diversion (and its opposite, a rigid attachment) through

bodily practices, like the doctor’s diversion of a catarrh, or the docked tail of Alcibiades’ dog

which stops the populace from chattering (“babiller”) about “ses autres actions” (836). The body

lurks behind the mind’s processes.

Even the desire of this essay to confront sexual passion straightforwardly (in plain

French, as “De trois bonnes femmes” puts it) is diverted by a slippage into a very Latin body:

Montaigne turns from an exhortation to break up too powerful an amorous passion with a

diversion to the words of first Persius and Lucretius, bundled together in a double quote:

Cum morosa vago singultiet inguine vena (835)

(When the capricious vein throbs in the restless member)

Conjicito humorem collectum in corpora quaeque.

(Eject the gathered sperm in anything at all)12

The citational practice here diverts, prematurely withdrawing us from one text to another. This is

writing as withholding; and from this startling image of the flesh denied, Montaigne brings us

back not to anything at all but right to La Boétie, whose death is discreetly ejected from the text

Readings of French Renaissance Literature ed. John O'Brien and Malcolm Quainton (Liverpool:

Liverpool University Press, 2000), 202-16; John Bernard, “Montaigne and Writing: Diversion

and Subjectification in the Essais” Montaigne Studies 3, no. 1-2 (1991): 131-55.

12 Complete Works, trans. Frame, 769.

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as “un puissant desplaisir” from which Montaigne distracts himself from “par art” by falling in

love. This confession of his deliberately chosen emotion punctures the gendered binary between

fakers and makers; it lets men, too, at least those in danger of being “perdu à l’avanture,” try out

the affordances of the counterfeit.

As if to distract his reader from such conjecture, Montaigne then diverts us back to his

original suspicion of women’s emotional performances, telling how he has seen women seek to

“divertir les opinions et conjectures du peuple” by covering “leurs vrayes affections par des

affections contrefaictes” (836). Yet again this suggested binary between true and fake erodes

almost as soon as it is imagined: “Mais j’en ay veu telle qui, en se contrefaisant, s’est laissée

prendre à bon escient, et a quitté la vraye et originelle affection pour la feinte.” Where the earlier

essay imagined women’s noise as a clue to their feigning, this counter-example (which follows

that of Alcibiades’s distracting dog) sets a conscious use of the false as a way to distract us from

the noise of talk, to “desvoyer les parleurs.” In this instance, sound represents uncomfortable

truth.

But in a subsequent example, sound is employed in still another way, as a figure for the

almost ceremonial arousal of emotion:

Le son mesmes des noms, qui nous tintoüine aux oreilles: Mon pauvre maistre! ou, Mon

grand amy! Hélas! mon cher pere! ou, Ma bonne fille! quand ces redites me pinsent et

que j’y regarde de pres, je trouve que c’est une plainte grammairiene et voyelle. Le mot et

le ton me blessent. (837)

The familiar Montaignian concern with the relation between name and thing diverts itself into a

relation between sound and emotion; though these are banal “redites,” utterly without

particularity, “grammairiene et voyelle,” they draw force from the inseparability of word and

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tone, with mot and ton as chiasmic counterpoints. This is ceremonial emotion, but it is a

ceremony with animal force. Montaigne continues:

Comme les exclamations des prescheurs esmouvent leur auditoire souvant plus que ne

font leurs raisons et comme nous frappe la voix piteuse d’une beste qu’on tue pour nostre

service; sans que je poise ou penetre cependant la vraye essence et massive de mon

subject… (837)

If in “De trois bonnes femmes” Montaigne read sound as an index of fakery, here he

seems to suggest you can – in mourning terms – bring yourself off if you give yourself over to it.

Montaigne describes an affect brought about through the banality, the commonality, of sound;

the banality of his own repetitions, “Comme…comme” take us along with him. The voicing of

the preachers is more crucial than their reason, and the pitiful voice of a creature slaughtered,

without even the possibility of articulation, brings about “les fondements de nostre deuil”

without that pain diverting itself through conscious reflection. In this telling, the truth of emotion

(elsewhere so fugitive) is not exactly extra-linguistic, but somewhere to its side, flickering

midway between a bellow and an essay.13

13 On the “seductive power of voice” in “De la diversion,” see Tom Conley, “A Devil in

Diversion: Number and Line in the Essais,” Configurations 17, no. 1-2 (2009): 87-103 (101).

Conley’s reading of the “geometry of style” (99) in the essay traces its imbrications with the

preceding essay’s fascination with numbers, “De trois commerces”; in pairing III,4 with “De

trois bonnes femmes,” let me second Conley’s fascination with the essay’s complex patterning.

On voice, though chiefly the voice of Montaigne himself variously considered, see also Giovanni

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In the B text, Montaigne brings us from here to the power of fictive “plaintes,” putting

the textual traditions of Virgil and Catullus into vibrant relation with the wall of sound. But the

discussion of emotion then shifts back to orality: Montaigne considers both how an orator can

bring about in himself “un vray deuil et essentiel” through the false words he voices to the judge,

just as a hired mourner taking on grief “en forme empruntée,” can eventually through this form

“reçoivent en eux une vraye melancholie” (838).

Where the introduction to “De trois bonnes femmes” feared the artifice of affect, in “De

la diversion” affect’s authenticity may even be brought about through artifice. What’s changed?

In the earlier essay, emotion performs itself in isolation: the mistiming of the mourning wives

means they emote alone. In III, 4, in contrast, affect is a collective endeavor: it spills over from

person to person. Recounting a funeral party to which he belonged, Montaigne notes that “par

tout où nous passions, nous remplissons de lamentation et de pleurs le peuple que nous

rencontrions, par la seule montre de l’appareil de nostre convoy.” As Sara Ahmed puts it, affect

is sticky.14 Its movements attach us, sometimes awkwardly. To say we do not feel in isolation

might sound heartening; but Montaigne’s sticky transmissions, these tears that come about at the

sight of funeral trappings, also suggest the strange and almost material superfluity of affect

(“nous remplissons”) and its discomfiting leftovers.

This shared mourning brings us eventually to still another set of mourning wives. But

whereas “De trois bonnes femmes” worried over the sounds and the priestly “offices” such

Dotoli, La Voix de Montaigne: Langue, corps et parole dans les “Essais” (Paris: Éditions

Lanore, 2007).

14 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 89-95.

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women make, here the sound of mourning is reconfigured and redeemed as a venerated form of

priestliness. In a newly anthropologizing, topographizing voice, Montaigne describes:

En une contrée pres de nos montaignes, les femmes font le prestre martin : car, comme

elles agrandissent le regret du mary perdu par la souvenance des bonnes et agreables

conditions qu’il avoit, elles font tout d’un trein aussi recueil et publient ses imperfections,

comme pour entrer d’elles mesmes en quelque compensation et se divertir de la pitié au

desdain.15 (838)

“De la diversion” has by this point worked through a number of figures for mourning’s loss. In

the example of the mountain women, loss is trialled through a set of affective changes back,

forth, back, forth, with no weight on either side, and no sense that either model carries the day.

The mountain women’s mixed mourning casts emotion as a continual and chosen choreography

that explores affective range without necessarily settling on any final position. The women’s

emotion-diversion – from pity to disdain and perhaps back again – is a mark not of the fickleness

or fakery of women but stands rather as an example of an admired emotional inventiveness, and

Montaigne gives an exemplary name to their activity: they are doing “le prestre martin,”

following the example of a proverbial priest who gave both call and responses as he said the

Mass.

The mountain women’s rich offering for affect studies stems in part from their plurality –

more than one woman, more than one montaigne - a plurality underlined by their inhabiting of

all the affective roles, as Preacher Martin does all the voices. If emotion has often been figured

as something stemming from an individual with subjectivity, then affect has a different

15 On the women’s status as part of a terroir, see Conley, “Number,” 102.

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configuration; it does not emerge from or create a neatly-bounded self but holds somewhere

between such selves. Where Democritus and Heraclitus of 1, 50, the one laughing disdainfully

and the other weeping, split out emotion between individuals, here the mountain women do both

those things and do them together. Of course, Montaigne gives the mountain women this plural

form because they are described anthropologically; they cannot be singled out or named in the

way of a great male historical exemplar. Nonetheless, they provide a glimpse of a shared

affective practice.

The mountain women’s priestly publications also speak to a number of questions in the

history of emotions. Where a good deal of work on the Renaissance history of emotion has

insisted on the importance of the humoral body, buffeted by liquid forces often beyond

individual control, more recent work accounts instead for other frameworks – say, rhetoric – that

make the case for emotion’s languages and practices as something distinct from a passion that

one undergoes, in the early modern understanding of that term; in the work seen, for example, in

Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan’s recent collection on The Renaissance of Emotion, emotion is

inextricable from questions of agency and free will.16 In the deliberate choice to try out both

16 Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan, The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in

Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), which

sets itself in contrast to the humoral model they see characterizing earlier work done in volumes

like Reading the Early Modern Passions, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-

Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). I think the distinction between

these models is overblown, but that’s perhaps because of my reading of Montaigne, who himself

does le prestre martin between different figures for understanding emotion.

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attitudes, the prestre-martin women certainly summon up a ceremonial, willed emotion which is

very different from the buffeted body suckered by affect’s punch.

In warping the earlier assumption that the sound of women’s mourning is false, these

women also warp a liturgical model based on language’s ability to call up transcendence. When

the priest speaks, his words bring about the truth of the Incarnation; here, the women play out the

liturgical call-and-response, but the priestly language has eroded into an emotion that both

depends on and denies the memory of a linguistic form. In speaking in two voices, Preacher

Martin speaks both for himself and for the public. These women, too, “publish” their own marital

memories; the term hesitates between print and orality, between the page and the sermon. Their

affective observation creates a loop between self and public, a mode not so distant from an essay:

I publish my emotion, I transmit it, it comes back to me differently. Emotion’s experiment

comes about through transmitted forms.

Form is indeed, as Eugenie Brinkema’s recent work on cinema tells us so beautifully, an

affective force; and the mountain women suggest a form of essaying emotion, trying it out, that

recalls more broadly the way in which movement, back and forth, is an affective model central to

Montaigne’s ethical-formal experimentation in publishing, from the opening essay onwards.17 In

“Par divers moyens,”(I,1) Montaigne moves carefully through a range of supplicational

structures, trying out each variation in turn in a movement that both recalls and moves beyond

the dialectical structure of rhetorical tradition: in this position one might feel that; or not... Like

the women of “nos montaignes,” in his first essay our own Montaigne imagines emotion by

17 Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

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doing the prestre martin with a range of historical exemplars, placing himself first as vanquisher

and then as vanquished.

Montaigne’s mountain women could be almost comic, but Montaigne is very serious

about their example. In the C addition, Montaigne returns to the women and gives them a

theological language:

[they are] de bien meilleure grace encore que nous qui, à la perte du premier connu, nous

piquons à luy prester des louanges nouvelles et fauces, et à le faire tout autre, quand nous

l’avons perdu de veue, qu’il ne nous sembloit estre quand nous le voyions : comme si le

regret estoit une partie instructive ; ou que les larmes, en lavant nostre entendement,

l’esclaircissent. (III, 4, 838C)

Earlier in the essay, the memory of “une grace particuliere” (836) that characterizes the person

we mourn is something that “nous afflige”; grace overwhelms us in the erotico-theological style

familiar from “De l’amitié.” But where that example is still resolutely attached to the lost love –

it is the mourned party who is graceful - here mourning itself, in this new liturgical form,

becomes a kind of grace and one that we can, as mourners left behind, choose to exercise. And

where in “De trois bonnes femmes” Montaigne seemed to contrast the fake mourning of women

with his true mourning, here it is the women’s procedure which is praised, and “ours” (presumed

male) which is mocked for its falsehood.18

18 If these women redeem the model of feminine false mourning of “De trois bonnes femmes,”

they also do better than model in “Que le goust des biens et des maux depend en bonne partie de

l’opinion que nous en avons,” which specifies that the widows of Narsinque “sont brûlées vives

20

In making a flexible gesture between each affect or attitude, the mountain women thus

move beyond the true/false emotion binary. This feminine flexibility of grace might be

contrasted with another C addition, in between the account of mourning’s sound and that of the

power of fables, where Montaigne suddenly diverts us through a description of his pained penis,

which suffers from the stickiness of stones: “L’opiniastreté de mes pierres, specialement en la

verge, m’a par fois jetté en longues supressions d’urine…” (837C). Where “opinaistreté” causes

only pain – Montaigne compares his suffering to that of criminals with their penis bound in

punishment – renouncing an opinion looks something like grace.

Faking a Conclusion

Montaigne’s mountain women certainly allow us a glimmer of a version of female emotion that

cannot be shut down as swiftly as those I described earlier. But I cannot hopefully turn them into

a set of alternate “bonnes femmes” fit for today; their brief appearance makes it hard to take

them as a stable critique of the earlier model of false mourning, and their own emotional moves,

refusing to dally with sequence or development, make a mockery of such affective exemplarity.

“De la diversion” is, as many commentators have noted, an essay which denies us

sequential arguments and draws continual and exhausting attention to its practice of writerly

non constamment seulement, mais gaïement aux funerailles de leurs maris” (1, 14, 52C); this

essay is also, famously, the place of Montaigne’s own refusal of mourning for his children.

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diversion. It doesn’t go anywhere. And yet it has often been read as a step somewhere else, as an

important example in a sequence of any number of intellectual histories: Jean Mesnard identified

it as an essay which “a pu donner naissance, d’une façon lointaine, mais indiscutable et comme

necessaire, au grand thème pascalien du divertissement,” showing how Pascal must have derived

his terminology from a reading of Montaigne.19 If I may divert Mesnard back to orgasmology, it

would also be possible to describe Pascal’s wager as a form of faking it until you make it; but

Montaigne, I suggest, is by the time of this essay more interested in faking as making.

More recently Emiliano Ferrari, fellow explorer of the new affective territory of nos

montaignes, has described the place of Montaigne’s diversion as affective technique within a

long history of the emotions. Ferrari discusses diversion as a kind of “passion compensatrice,” a

passion which operates on another to chase it away, and he sees this as a Montaignian innovation

that will be later taken up by Bacon, Spinoza, and Hume. In Ferrari’s reading, where diversion

sets out a sequence in which emotion x is chased out by emotion y, then its use by Montaigne

can also be set within its own sequence breaking a path (“ouvre ainsi la voie…à…”) in what we

can call a history of emotions, leading variously, he suggests, to Descartes, to Pascal, or to

19 Jean Mesnard, “De La ‘Diversion’ Au ‘Divertissement’,” Memorial Du 1er Congrès

International des Etudes Montaignistes (Bordeaux Sarlat, 1-4 Juin 1963), ed. Georges Pallassi

(Paris: Taffard, 1964), 123-28 (123). This Pascalian diversion of Montaigne is also traced by

R.A. Sayce, The Essays of Montaigne, (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 137; for

other intellectual histories of diversion, see Gregory John Sims, Essaying Prudence: Montaigne

and the Semiotics of Diversion (PhD diss, Johns Hopkins, 1993).

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Hume.20 In this reading, diversion prepares the way for a later coming in an intellectual history

of emotion.

In contrast, my interest in the mountain women’s oscillation between two affective

modes does not seek to trace sequence either within Montaigne’s text or as a way of describing

its historical significance. Rather, I want to imagine their movement as a composition that pushes

us out of a history of the emotions, but also out of a settled position on affect. It makes affect

neither an authentic force nor a social code, but an unsettling alternation between them.

What does this form of grace afford us in our attempts to think through affect? In moving

away from feminist and queer critiques of fake orgasm as normative conformity, Jagose claims a

space for the practice as what she calls a “critical hypothetical” (204): what if I could get off this

way? what if I felt differently if I tried this position? or what if I just need this space to myself? I

want to suggest that Montaigne’s habit of trying out new positions could be described in the

same way: if he is drawn to trying out the truth of fake emotion, it is because he himself is

always, in Jagosian manner, faking it.

Trinity College, Oxford

20 Emiliano Ferrari, Montaigne: Une anthropologie des passions (Paris: Garnier, 2014), 266.