SOURCE: Stanton, Domna C. “Woman as Object and Subject of Exchange: Marie de Gournay's Le Proumenoir (1594).” L'Esprit créateur 23, no. 2 (summer 1983): 9-25.

In the essay below, Stanton analyzes gender conflicts in de Gournay's Le Proumenoiur, especially underscoring the dynamics of manipulation in which men treat women as objects of exchange and women allow themselves to be “subjects of exchange.”

“L'échange … Fournit Le Moyen de lier les hommes entre eux,” Lévi-Strauss writes in Structures élémentaires de la parenté; and of the goods men exchange, the ‘most precious’ is women, “sans lesquelles la vie … est réduite aux pires formes de l'abjection.”¹ Copiously analyzing the exogamous matrimonial rules that legislate the incest prohibition, Lévi-Strauss nonetheless fails to explore the “abjection” to which his universalist theory reduces women; he simply cites “[le] dur destin d'un exil … l'existence lointaine et isolée qui est le lot des filles...