I’ll begin my examination of the Anima/Animus concept and Montaigne with the closest example he has to an anima figure, his late career collaborator Marie de Gournay. The more I dig into the history of de Gournay’s work, the sadder her story becomes to me. This is a woman who was treated terribly by her contemporaries. She was consistently mocked by the Paris establishment and was the subject of frequent pranks. Her claims of kinship with Montaigne led to her being held to impossible standards by the male cultural gatekeepers of her time and much of her most important work was ignored for years—and in some sense still is—mostly because she never produced anything on par with Montaigne.
As I’ve mentioned frequently during this project, Montaigne has a unique power to elicit literary kinship with his readers, especially among other writers. We have seen this spill out over the centuries since the essays were first published, and famous writers throughout history have felt that their interior lives were being told through his work. What makes de Gournay especially interesting is that she was the first to experience this, and it came when she was 18 years old. She was so taken by the essays that her mother felt it necessary to get a prescription for a sedative for her to calm her immediate reaction. De Gournay’s long-term reaction to the essays was to imitate the work and begin her own project that led to a heavily Montaigne-inspired novel.
It was this exuberance that led her to Montaigne personally. Exactly what happened at their first meeting will never be known and has been the subject of great speculation for centuries. All we know for sure is that both of them left that meeting feeling that a father/daughter like bond had been forged by them, and de Gournay soon after began to serve as an editor/literary assistant to Montaigne’s last batch of original essays and revisions to past essays.
Correspondence between the two validates the importance of de Gournay’s work. Perhaps the greatest direct contribution she made to the essays was making all of Montaigne’s quotes, the vast majority of them in Latin, more widely accessible to readers. In the earliest editions of the essays, Montaigne made no effort to attribute these quotes to anyone, he just placed the Latin text in his work and left it to readers to either know the material or not. De Gournay was self-taught in Latin and extremely well read, and it was she who began the long, laborious process of identifying all of the material, with accurate attributions.
She also helped to transcribe Montaigne’s notes, which often were hand written in the margins of a previously published edition of his essays that included unusually wide margins. But she did something more than that—through numerous conversations that happened both face to face and over letters, de Gournay began to change Montaigne’s mind about the ability of women to form close working relationships and friendships with men. In his On Affectional Relationships essay, Montaigne originally went to great lengths to deny that any kind of bond that he had with La Boetie could be replicated between a man and a woman. But those references softened considerably due to de Gournay’s influence and by the last batch of essays, Montaigne appeared to be fully convinced of the intellectual equality of men and women and the possibility of that same kind of caring, appreciative working relationship between the sexes.
What you don’t see in the later essays, however, is some radical rethinking or flight of fancy from Montaigne. We don’t see any great inspiration from de Gournay in the work, just consistent, invaluable input. This contrasts heavily with the influence that Sabina Spielrein had over Carl Jung’s writings, and which became the inspiration for his Anima/Animus theory. While there remains significant dispute over the nature of that relationship, there is no doubt that there’s was a deeply passionate intellectual bond. We will never know the complete truth about their physical relationship, but there can be no doubt that Jung and Spielrein were deeply in love with each other’s minds.
This led Jung to become increasingly distant from his mentor Sigmond Freud, and in turn inspired Spielrein to invent her own approach to psychoanalysis that bridged the gap between Jung and Freud in important ways that continue to influence the field. I’ll explore in another essay just how much validity there might be to the Anima/Animus theory if applied to Montaigne’s thinking. But after looking closely at the kind of work de Gournay did with and for Montaigne both in his last living days and posthumously, I have to conclude that their relationship did not fit the mould that Jung and Spielrein cast.
Rather, I think it’s clear that Montaigne/de Gournay bond was far more akin to a classic mentor/protege relationship. Montaigne adored de Gournay and perhaps even saw in their relationship something that had echoes of his friendship with La Boetie, but there’s no doubt that his prodigious literary output and the 34 year age gap between them made it impossible for the two to stand on equal ground. I think it is quite likely that if Montaigne had lived another five to ten years, Montaigne would have done more to help promote de Gournay’s contributions and create a platform for her future writing career. It’s unfortunate that the insights he gained from their pairing didn’t have time to fully bloom and become part of his literary corpus.
But none of this should, in any way, detract from her incredible contributions to Montaigne’s work or to the value of her own writing. Many great writers in history have been inspired by Montaigne but come up short with their own attempts to imitate his output. And it cannot be disputed that if a male executor had expressed an ambition to carry on his literary legacy, but failed to live up to it, the literary establishment wouldn’t have used that as an excuse to ignore any editorial assistance lent to Montaigne’s work. Marie de Gournay was, and to an extent still is, a horrific victim of sexism across time.
She deserves a place equal to La Boetie in the Montaigne pantheon for her hands on contributions and long-term determination to make sure that the best, fullest versions of Montaigne’s work reached the widest possible audience.
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