SOURCE: “Lucrèce, Junie, and Clélie: Burdens of Female Exemplarity,” in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, Vol. 17, 1990, pp. 515-23.

In the following essay, Gaines compares Scudéry's rendering of violated feminine honor in Clélie with other contemporary French revisions of Livy's story of the rape of Lucretia. The critic suggests that by emphasizing the feelings and inner life of women, rather than the actions and honor of men, Scudéry grants women a greater power to shape both their own lives and history, and she helps clear the path for the modern psychological novel.

Of all the Greco-Roman heroines that the French Renaissance placed beside, and often before, the pious female saints of the Middle Ages, none had assumed more prominence by mid-seventeenth century than Lucretia, the celebrated victim of Sextus Tarquinius. Other exemplary women, such as Portia or...