Women who laugh are dangerous - nonfiction.fr The portal of books and ideas
Female laughter has been framed, controlled and feared for a long time: it was only in the 20th century that women acquired the right to laugh and make people laugh.
In what is more an essay than a history book, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, who was a research engineer at the Collège de France, tries to identify the characteristics of female laughter from Antiquity to the present day. En une vingtaine de chapitres qui sautent allègrement de Christine de Pisan à Florence Foresti en passant par les précieuses du XVIIe siècle, quelques invariants du rire féminin se révèlent.
A dangerous laughter
One of the constants of female laughter is that he is perceived as threatening.Laughing, women hide their role and put virility in danger."It is not a question of pretending that women of yesteryear did not laugh, but that moral discourse and the standards of politeness considered laughter likely to pervert femininity".
From the comedies of Aristophanes, in ancient Greece, the laughter of women is subversion.It is when they contested and make the sex strike that Aristophanes' women laugh, between them and without men.Their laugh calls into question the social and warrior order.
Consequently, criticism abound when women laugh.They must hide their cheerfulness even in intimacy: thus, for Rousseau, marriage is too serious for married women to laugh.In 1787, the painter Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun caused a scandal: in her self-portrait with her daughter, she dares to reveal her teeth.The painting is deemed excessive by contemporaries: a woman, who is more a mother, can only afford the closed mouth smile.Only children can appear hilarious in the representations of the time.Device therefore assumes that women do not seek to provoke laughter: Talleyrand (1734-1838) praises his mother for having never sought to make people laugh or make a good word.
The laughter of women can however serve as a literary expedient. Dans les comédies des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, les servantes, qui se démarquent par leur rire franc, qui s’oppose aux subtilités de l’esprit précieux, ont pour rôle de contester l’ordre social.But this female laugh that denounces the flaws of good society is never a radical questioning.At most, it allows you to spare a rest in the balance of power, which always end up reaffirming themselves.
Too sexual laughter
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If the laughter of women is dangerous, it is also that it is associated with sexuality.Aristophanes describes in her pieces of women's laughter to lubricate inclinations.In Greek mythology, when his Persephone daughter is removed by the God of Hell, Demeter loses all joy: it is a woman who shows her her cock that makes her smile. Au XIIe siècle, Hildegarde de Bingen associe le rire au péché originel et à tout ce qui relève du bas du corps, des parties honteuses.The fabliaux, these little comic stories from the end of the Middle Ages, imply that women only like to laugh about sex.They cannot, in laughter, go beyond the limits of decency without being condemned.Men, on the contrary, easily allow themselves to be Grivoois without losing their honor.The laughter of women is associated with their bodies and what it has uncontrollable.
This trend continues for centuries if we believe Sabine Melchior-Bonnet. Le discours de la pudeur se renforce au XVIIe siècle, obligeant les femmes à rire en cachette. « Toute la pédagogie du XIXe siècle consiste à canaliser les pulsions des adolescentes, à retenir leur imagination, à effacer leurs grimaces.In the newspapers of young women of the time, laughter then appears as a transgression.The novels of this century take up the same shots.The laughter of women must be discreet, innocent, almost childish.The woman who laughs too loud is suspected of being a courtesan, a male eater. Le rire des femmes est donc relativement ambigu chez les auteurs du XIXe siècle : il est tout à la fois « le rire frais de la grisette et le rire dévorant de la femme lubrique.But laughter, dangerous when it overflows, can also be a laugh of complicity that allows seduction and promises pleasure: this contradiction does not find a resolution.
The triumph of female laugh?
Sabine Melchior-Bonnet finally seeks to understand the slow conquest of laughter by women.She claims that irony, handled brilliantly by Christine de Pisan and the precious, is a way for women to appropriate laughter.However, it is a shame that the exact definitions of laughter and irony never appear: is irony the same as laughter?A laughter may be, but which does not fall under the same register as the comic laughter. Toujours est-il que faire rire a été jusqu’à récemment une prérogative masculine : les femmes ne sont devenues comédiennes et professionnelles du rire que dans les cafés-concerts de la fin du XIXe siècle.Nevertheless, these women who make people laugh are forced to laugh at themselves, to caricature themselves, and to recognize the incompatibility of their profession with the canons of beauty in vogue.The woman who makes laugh is necessarily ugly.
Les précieuses du XVIIe siècle apparaissent comme des précurseures, des ancêtres de ces femmes qui font rire.By taunting, more than real laughter, they open a "satirical path to female writing.But women who write must adopt the misogynist codes of society: laughter opens a breach but it is not total emancipation.These precious also create badine societies, with rules that combine laughter and decorum.Madame de la Ferté-Imbault is thus at the origin of the sublime order of the laturelus, "a kind of medieval order surrounded by mystery where the rites of chivalry are taken up and adapted on a burlesque mode. » Ces femmes s’approprient aussi des jeux plus cruels : le persiflage, terme qui serait apparu dans les années 1730, fait fureur dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle.
Feminists also know how to laugh.Virginia Woolf, even without adopting this title, affirms in 1905 in The Value of Laughter the emancipatory role of laughter for women.Laughter, which appears to him as a characteristic sign of female writing, makes it possible to reveal the artifices of society and to free himself from bourgeois conventions. Les autrices et les comédiennes du XXe siècle vont dans le même sens : avec le rire, elles disent le monde du point de vue des faibles et rient de leurs propres incohérences.
Despite its abundant character and its many examples, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet's book sometimes struggles to convince, by putting laughing and making people laugh and finally treating more literature than history, despite the title.It also lacks a solid conclusion which would give more coherence to the whole and to better understand the issues of a subject still eminently political and controversial.
