Le Livre De La Cite Des Dames

Maureen Quilligan (Essay Date 1988)

SOURCE: Quilligan, Maureen. "Allegory and the Textual Body: Female Authority in Christine de Pizan's Livre de la Cite des dames." Romanic Review 79, no. 1 (1988): 222-42.

In the following essay, Quilligan examines Christine's process of revising traditional texts as a strategy for creating her own authority.

In their massive study of the woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar not only ask such impish questions as—if a pen is a metaphorical penis, with what metaphorical organ does a woman write?—they also revise Harold Bloom's influential thesis about the profound anxiety there is in all literary tradition and argue that for a woman writer the question is not so much an anxiety of influence as an "anxiety of authorship." For a woman to pick...