Mapping the Contours of the Heart in Madeleine de Scudéry's Carte de Tendre

Much has been written about Madeleine de Scudéry’s allegorical Carte de Tendre (Map of Tenderness) since it was first published in volume one of her ten-volume novel Clelie. Histoire romaine in 1654. Debate has focused the hermeneutics of Scudéry’s articulation of a topography of the emotions she describes as amour (love), amitie (friendship), and tendresse (tenderness), and the subversive potential of an affective geography that positioned women as the arbiters of emotional relationships between men and women (see eg Joan DeJean 1997, Jeffery N. Peters, 2004, Anne E. Duggan, 1996). No longer dismissed as a frivolous salon game, Scudéry’s map and its accompanying Gazette de Tendre propose a heterosocial paradigm of sociability that identifies sentiment, in particular the ability of women to articulate the tender dimensions of the heart, as the key to navigating social and political relations in both the seventeenth-century literary salon and the absolutist state of Louis XIV. This paper will explore the implications of Scudéry’s gendered account of the emotional topography of the heart and seek to problematise the notion that women have greater access to a language of emotion expressed by the heart. If women are, as Scudéry suggests, more capable of articulating the semantic dimensions of emotion, does this have the capacity to increase female agency or does it sideline female voices to a realm of experience often dismissed as marginal or of lesser importance than traditional political matters?