SOURCE: “Heroic Infidelity: Novella 15,” in Heroic Virtue, Comic Infidelity: Reassessing Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron, edited by Dora E. Polachek, Hestia Press, 1993, pp. 62-76.

In the essay that follows, Cholakian traces the tensions within Marguerite de Navarre's authorial voice and identifies a “feminine difference” in her retelling of traditional narratives.

One of the questions raised by present-day debates about women and literature is that of what constitutes a feminine difference in women's writing. In teasing out an answer to this question in the Heptaméron, I want to use two approaches. The first is what Nancy K. Miller calls “overreading” or reading for a woman's signature. Its purpose is “to put one's finger—figuratively—on the place of production that marks the spinner's attachment to her web” (“Arachnologies” 288). Miller suggests that such overreading “involves a focus on the moments in the narrative which by their representation of writing...