SOURCE: “Desire and Writing in Scudéry's ‘Histoire de Sapho,’” in L'Esprit Créateur, Vol. 35, No. 2, Summer 1995, pp. 37-50.

In the following essay, Hannon illuminates Scudéry's depiction of desire in her “Histoire de Sapho,” from Artamène. Employing the insights of the twentieth-century French feminist Hélène Cixous, Hannon explores how Scudéry's writing about the female body in her amatory fiction imagines a place of greater freedom for women.

Scudéry scholarship often focuses on her 1654 novel Clélie, which contains the “Carte de Tendre,” the best known of the many amorous geographies in vogue during the second half of the seventeenth century. Scudéry's sometimes ambiguous distinction between the friendship or “amitié tendre” of the land of Tendre and the passionate love of the “Terres Inconnues” has elicited divergent critical interpretations: certain critics emphasize the novel's intellectual, spiritual love reflective of the purgation of...