“I's” in Drag

1669 saw the publication in France of a slim volume of correspondence often taken to be the origin or at least the intertextual model of a certain kind of eighteenth-century novel. Published anonymously and announced as “an accurate copy of the translation of five Portuguese letters which were written to a gentleman of quality, who was serving in Portugal,” ¹ it was a one-way correspondence of love letters entitled Lettres portugaises traduites en français, or, as it is generally referred to in English, The Letters of a Portuguese Nun. The history of the reception of the letters is the history of a debate over origins, authorship, and authority that is documented in the introduction to the Garnier edition of the letters and that I will not rehearse here. I will, however, begin my discussion by citing the opening moves of that text—“The Enigma of the Portuguese Letters”—because it reveals an important translation or displacement of what I take to be the more interesting riddle: why were these letters written by a man as a woman to himself and then thought to be written by a woman?

Whether for reasons of modesty [pudeur] or appearances [préjugés], the great works of the seventeenth century that stage the passions of love directly and without a mask are anonymous: we don’t know what the respective participation of Mme de Lafayette, La Rochefoucauld, and Segrais is in La Princesse de Clèves; exceptionally, twenty-five years after his death, a kind of miracle revealed the name of the author of the Illustres françaises; and finally, the most surprising case, three hundred years after the publication of the Lettres portugaises, editors of library catalogues still do not know under what name to file their author, nor even to which literature, French or Portuguese, they should attribute the letters.

But the problem does not concern scholars only. Every reader feels obliged to take part in this debate, and eventually his opinion becomes an article of faith. Why this unusual passion in a discussion of this sort? National pride plays only a small part, and the partisans of the “French” or “Portuguese” position have always had courteous confrontations. What explains the ardor of the quarrel is that it raises the eternal question of the superiority of art or genius. To admit that the Lettres portugaises were written in a convent, by a nun with virtually no education, and no experience of the world, is to believe that spontaneity, that pure passion inspired a woman to write a work superior to that which the best minds of the greatest period of French literature could offer their public. ²