"Person's of the Sex are True Wonders": Gabrielle Suchon's Reversals of Nature

• In Event: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory I

Abstract

Gabrielle Suchon’s Treatise on Ethics and Politics offers an analysis of the variety of harms suffered by women because of their exclusion from public life and subordinated social status. By forcing women into institutions which subject them to strict male authority, such as marriage or the cloister, women are deprived of three elements of a fully human life: freedom, knowledge, and authority. According to Suchon, women’s vicious behavior—their propensity to slander and to deception, and their emotional volatility—is an expected result of the constraint, ignorance, and dependence in which they spend their lives. Despite this rather unflattering characterization of women, Suchon frequently insists that she does not hold women in contempt. In the preface of her treatise, she offers an enigmatic explanation of her characterization of women’s difference:“I do my best to make women appear illustrious, despite the debased condition in which they spend their lives … If grace and nature perform miracles, ethics creates its own wonders, with these differences: whereas the wonders of grace always work to perfect their subjects, natural wonders often cause the ruin of their subjects, but those of politics and ethics do not destroy them entirely but simply restrain the course of their activity and prevent them from reaching the sublime heights they’re capable of. It is in this sense that persons of the sex are true wonders” (75).

This paper explores why Suchon consistently describes women’s behavior—their passions, duplicitousness, and slander—as wondrous, and not simply vicious. I argue that Suchon uses this language to avoid a rhetorical dilemma that still divides feminist theorists to this day; namely, the question of how to respond to women’s differences. On the one hand, some feminists celebrate women’s difference, revalorizing these traits to show that these qualities (such as being passionate or emotional) are not in fact faults which can justify inequality. On the other hand, some feminists view difference as lamentable, seeing it as produced by patriarchal socialization. Suchon, however, points out the rhetorical weaknesses of both of these strategies. By revalorizing ‘feminine’ behavior, Suchon points out that one risks undercutting the urgency of eliminating the patriarchal institutions that produced that behavior. By lamenting difference, however, one seems to hold women in contempt, and risks reinforcing sexist stereotypes about women.

Suchon moves beyond the dichotomy of celebration or contempt as the only possible responses to difference, and instead treats difference as wondrous. Wonder, especially in the seventeenth century, was understood as an ontological category that covered various types of preternatural phenomena. Earthquakes, eruptions, monstrous births, and other natural disasters represented imperfections that are produced, not by supernatural forces, but when things in the natural order are out of place. Suchon frequently introduces these images when describing the vices of women, encouraging the reader to view these faults not with contempt, but with awe and even fear.

My paper shows that, when placed in their proper context, Suchon’s metaphors avoid the rhetorical dilemma faced when discussing women’s differences. I argue that Suchon’s description of women’s differences appeals to the scholastic understanding of wonders to discredit their views about women. Just as earthquakes are caused when winds are out of place, “trapped in caverns and subterranean places”, women’s imperfections too must be caused by being removed from their natural place of equality. Thus, far from being evidence of their inferiority, Suchon shows that imperfections are proof of their equality. While Suchon argues that women’s differences are signs of their equality, this does not amount to a celebration of these differences. The unnatural conditions which women endure will “bring changes and troubles to families and typically turns order and conduct that must exist in the world topsy-turvy” (119). Suchon uses the idea of wonder, not just as a sign of women’s equality, but to show that these imperfections are a threat to men. Winds are called nothing more than “feeble vapour”, yet these seemingly weak winds produce “tumultuous commotions and frightful storms to rid itself of the tyrants that restrain it'' (119) Similarly, women, when out of place, are wonders that the men who tyrannize them should fear.

Author

• Mary Jo MacDonald, University of Toronto