Fortalecimiento Político-Institucional

Meaning is not found in its entirety within Montaigne’s text. Through double meanings, double interpretations, contradictions, gendered language, intertextuality and the ambiguity that they create, Montaigne’s Essais provides the beginning of a path of thought for his readers. Textual ambiguity functions as a reflection of humanity’s diversity within the essayist’s exploration of human existence. While ambiguity’s ultimate role is to create “infinis Essais” in the minds of Montaigne’s readers, it is evident that gender, sexuality and friendship play decisive roles in the significance of this ambiguity. Montaigne’s oscillation between misogyny and feminism is manifested in the female voice and female persona that the essayist establishes for himself. His own misogynistic and feminist tendencies are thus problematized by the author’s female persona.

Montaigne’s exploration of friendship with men and women offer the reader a plethora of contradictions, problematizations, destabilization and uncertainty; his essay “De l’amitié” is at the same time an hommage to and mourning for Etienne de La Boétie, his dearest friend. From his personal experience to his consideration of humanity’s

idiosyncrasies, Montaigne’s representation of his friendship with another man creates ambiguity regarding their sexual orientation. In this way Montaigne plays with his readers, making them consider love between men in ways they most certainly had not before. He recreates the ancients’ debate about love between men, thus continuing their contemplation

of homosexuality to an infinity that is atemporal. The essayist also engages in an erotics of writing that allows him to experience fully the sublimity of his friendship with La Boétie.

Montaigne’s exploration of friendship with women is much more limited than the perfect friendship he explores with men, yet it is even more complicated and contradictory. Despite the fact that he denies women the capacity for true friendship, he names Marie le Jars de Gournay his “fille d’alliance” and shares with her a friendship based on similar

intellectual aptitudes and interests. Once again the text’s authorship is threatened with sexual ambiguity when Marie takes the role of the Essais’ editor – an act wholly reminiscent of Montaigne’s writing his oeuvre while mourning his other half. Marie, one of France’s early feminist writers, advocates women’s equality and education while evoking Montaigne’s authority. In this way, his friendship with Marie enables her to multiply the meaning of his

Essais with a feminist objective; thereby challenging and thus problematizing the misogynistic passages in Montaigne’s Essais.

While many critics of Montaigne either deny Marie de Gournay’s prowess or authenticity as Montaigne’s friend, others focus on the question of sexuality between Montaigne, Marie de Gournay and Etienne de La Boétie. Most criticism of the Essais has been somewhat conservative and exclusive to women, and Bauschatz notes that

Montaigne’s Essais can be used as a point of departure for considering reception in defining the gender of genre . . . . [T]he essay has been

considered primarily a male genre, particularly as first developed by

Montaigne, who used it to paint a portrait of himself and to describe his own masculinity. Literary critics have also viewed the essay as addressed to males, readers who would be like Montaigne himself, and who would themselves be able to replicate the masculine self-portrait (Gender 27-28).

This study has shown that not only are Montaigne’s self-portrait and voice feminine rather than masculine, but that women play a significant role within the text of Montaigne’s Essais

and outside the text as active readers and transformers. Montaigne challenges notions of gender and sexuality in a way that continues to spark infinite essays in the minds of his modern readers, which is why woman is quite possibly the ideal reader of the Essais.

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