Items
Details
Title
Iphis et Iante : comedie.
Created/published
A Paris : Chez Antoine de Sommaville ..., 1637.
Description
[8], 95, [1] pages ; 22 cm (4to)
Associated name
Benserade, Isaac de, 1613-1691, author.
Note
Dedication signed: De Bensseradde.
"Acheué d'imprimer le dernier Nouembre 1636"--Page [96].
Signatures: a⁴ A-M⁴
Title vignette: arms of Louis XIII.
This is a PRELIMINARY RECORD. It may contain incorrect information. The "FAST ACC" number is a temporary call number. Please email catalog@folger.edu for assistance.
"Acheué d'imprimer le dernier Nouembre 1636"--Page [96].
Signatures: a⁴ A-M⁴
Title vignette: arms of Louis XIII.
This is a PRELIMINARY RECORD. It may contain incorrect information. The "FAST ACC" number is a temporary call number. Please email catalog@folger.edu for assistance.
Cited/described in
Tchemerzine, II, p. 122
Place of creation/publication
France.
Item Details
Call number
FAST ACC 270947 (quarto)
Folger-specific note
Ordered from Inlibris, D 9230, 2018-08-24, email quote. From dealer's description: " 4to. [22 x 16.5 cm]. (8), 95 pp, (1). Bound in modern marbled wrappers. Old authorship notes on title-page, otherwise a very fresh, crisp copy. Rare sole edition of this remarkable French play in verse, adapting a fable from Ovid’s Metamorphoses into a daring commentary on the physical and emotional possibilities of a lesbian relationship. In the last two decades, Iphis et Iante has come to be recognized as a landmark in reference works ranging from David Robinson’s Closeted Writing and Lesbian and Gay Literature (2017) to Rebecca Wilkin’s Women, Imagination and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France (2008); it is even accorded a full chapter in both Marianne Legault’s Female Intimacies in Seventeenth-Century French Literature (2012) and Chris Mounsey’s Developments in the Histories of Sexualities (2013). Her husband having promised to kill off any female offspring she might bear, Iphis’ mother disguised her child’s sex from birth and raised her daughter as a son. When Iphis grows older she becomes attracted to the beautiful Iante – but here Benserade parts ways with Ovid. Instead, he offers a “rhapsodic reflection on the pleasures of their wedding night, which they spend together as women, before Iphis undergoes her miraculous transformation into a man and receives public sanction for her union with Iante. In this departure from his Ovidian source, in which the transformation in Iphis’s sex takes place in order to make the marriage possible, Benserade enters a realm of female homoeroticism that had scarcely been considered by other early modern writers who adapted this myth of female-female desire… Indeed, Benserade seems to delight his teasing his (mostly male) audience, not only by presenting them with the titillating puzzle of how these two might have been able to sexually satisfy one another, but also by offering them a highly eroticized description of how Iante’s feminine beauty has aroused Iphis to the point of orgasm…” (Elizabeth Wahl, Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment (1996), pp. 63-65). Quite aside from their physical love, Iphis and Iante together lament the fact that society will not recognize their marriage if Iphis reveals her true self; in all other respects Iante declares herself perfectly happy with her new husband. For his part, Benserade is rather coy in his preface ‘Au Lecteur’, commenting merely that “la sterilité du sujet m’a obligé d’y coudre quelques intrigues dont l’ajustement & la liaison n’a point paru tout à fait desagreable”. We have traced five copies in US institutions, at Harvard, Bowdoin, Dartmouth, NYPL, and U Penn. The University of Southern California records an original copy but in fact has a Photostat. No copies are recorded in Anglo-American auction records of the last 50 years, nor French auction records of the last 10 years. * Tchemerzine II, p. 122." Purchase made possible by The Georges Lurcy Acquisitions Fund.
Folger accession
270947