Advance Access Publication 17 December 2007

I N S I D E O U T: F E M A L E B O D I E S
IN RABELAIS

Keywords: Rabelais, Francois; Kristeva, Julia; Laqueur, Thomas; Bahktin,

Mikhail; body (treatment of ); childbirth (representations of ); the abject;
Renaissance literature; women in literature; feminism

READERS OF RABELAIS have long acknowledged the central place occupied by the
body in his work.1 The pseudo-epic tale of a dynasty of giants is also the narrative of their oversized and larger-than-life bodies. Throughout the story of their
births, friendships, feasts and travels, the pattern of their extraordinary lives is
shaped by the body and its functions: eating, drinking and excreting. Yet,
although the work relies upon the body, it is shown to be fundamentally unreliable: an unstable, poorly contained, unknowable entity.
The open-ended, ill-defined Rabelaisian body has attracted much critical
attention since it was first theorised by Bakhtin nearly forty years ago. For
Bakhtin, the distinctive feature of Rabelaiss work lies in his success in portraying the grotesque body. This grotesque or carnival body, as opposed to
the classical or naturalistic body, is the dominant model:
Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the
world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its
own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside
world, that is, through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through
which the body itself goes out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is on the
apertures or the convexities, or on the various ramifications and offshoots: the open
mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body discloses its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating,
Forum for Modern Language Studies Vol. 44 No. 1
doi:10.1093/fmls/cqm120
# The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews.
All rights reserved.

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ABSTRACT
This article explores representations of female bodies in Rabelais in the light of
Laqueurs notion of the one-sex body. Contrary to previous studies which
have argued that women are marginalised and excluded from Rabelaiss works,
this piece demonstrates the authors fascination with the female body, a site
that he revisits throughout his narratives. This preoccupation emerges from the
impossibility of resolving tensions inherent in the social construction of two
genders within the medically-defined one-sex body. As a consequence,
Rabelais continually seeks to cover over signs of female sexual difference by
using representational strategies which rewrite the female body in terms of its
safer (male) parallel, particularly during scenes of childbirth. These dynamics
of desire and revulsion echo Kristevas theory of the abject, where the primal
scene of abjection (the childs rejection of the Mother) resurfaces in societys
expulsion of waste beyond its boundaries, exteriorising the danger within.

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drinking, or defecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body, the link in the
chain of genetic development, or more correctly speaking, two links shown at the point
where they enter into each other.2

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It is not difficult to see the many ways in which this description of the grotesque body in general relates to Rabelaiss work in particular. To take but one
example, the constant references to food and drink in Rabelais demonstrate the
extent to which, for both sexes, the body is not in stasis, but is in constant flux.
In the description of how Gargantua spent his early childhood a` boyre,
manger, et dormir: a` manger, dormir, et boyre: a` dormir, boyre, et manger,3
we are reminded that the body must be continually replenished and rebuilt
(Gargantua, 10: p. 33). Conversely, through the depictions of excrement and
urine, we see that the body is prone to excess and overflowing. These images of
movement are, for Bakhtin, what characterise the grotesque body.
Central to Bakhtins argument is the way in which the lack of definition given
to bodies in Rabelais leads emphasis to be put not on their separation from the
world, but on their union with it. Thus, the significant features of the body are
those points which facilitate exchange with the world: bodily protuberances and
orifices through and within which transactions between the world and the body
take place. Furthermore, the body is limitless except when engaged in activities
where the world/body distinction is put into relief: sex, birth, death, eating,
drinking and defecation. It is clear that in this reconfiguration of the body and
the hierarchy of its functions, nothing can be taken for granted. This destruction
and dismissal of conventional representational boundaries has far-reaching consequences for the text. Ultimately, bodies which become indistinguishable not
only from each other but also from the world which surrounds them throw conventional ways of reading (and writing) off balance.4 This is not the only way in
which Rabelaisian bodies challenge the reader. Whilst the body may hold the
readers attention, it also provokes disgust through its baseness and its frequent
transgressions of the boundaries of seemly behaviour. This grotesque body not
only threatens the stability of the community within the text, but also challenges
the readers expectations of the literary work and what it should contain or
expel.
It is uncontroversial to assert that by naming copulation, pregnancy and
childbirth as privileged moments where the body discloses its own limits,
Bakhtin ascribes to woman a central place in the definition of the body. What is
more difficult to establish, however, is whether Bakhtins theory ultimately
allows the female body the liberty to transcend the constraints usually imposed
on it by male-dominated systems of representation. In other words, could
Bakhtins analysis allow the female body to move beyond the specific and act
as a paradigm through which bodies of all kinds can be read and understood?
Bakhtins refusal to lend any order or hierarchy to the body has left this question
unanswered. Furthermore, critical reactions to his writing have not provided a
coherent response.5

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We must note that the image of the woman in the Gallic tradition, like other images in
this tradition, is given on the level of ambivalent laughter, at once mocking, destructive,
and joyfully reasserting. Can it be said that this tradition offers a negative, hostile attitude
toward woman? Obviously not. The image is ambivalent.8

This view perpetuates what E. Jane Burns has described elsewhere as genderless conclusions that excuse antifeminism of the worst kind as if it were a purely
rhetorical mode without historical consequence.9 I concur with Burns in
arguing that a negative view of woman cannot exist solely at a textual level, but
must be read as a representation whose historical reality is also negative.
Although Bakhtins analysis appears to be centred on the female body, female
subjectivity is, in practice, absent from his theoretical frameworks.
Bahktins reconfiguration of the representational process also has important
consequences for gender in Rabelaiss work. Many scholars have outlined that
women face significant difficulties both as readers of, and protagonists in,
Rabelaiss work.10 Wayne Booths (in)famous discussion of the marginal role of
women readers of Rabelais sparked a number of feminist replies, which criticised his argument for its mimicry and lack of understanding of the reading
process for women. It was substantially revised by Nancy K. Miller, who
warned us against colluding with the dominant homosocial dynamic and urged
us to read from the Ladys place. Carla Freccero further exposed the difficulties
of reading Rabelais as a woman, by showing that, like the Haulte Dame de
Paris, female readers were left with an unenviable choice: to reply and face the
charge of hypocrisy, or not to respond and thus collaborate with their own
effacement. Elizabeth Chesney-Zegura viewed Rabelais in a more positive light,
claiming that the author experiments with a nonauthoritarian, almost feminine
narrative voice in order to interrogate phallocentric culture.11
Following Francoise Charpentiers conceptualisation of the role of women in
Rabelais, it has become a critical commonplace to view women as being largely
absent from his work.12 This absence of women is all the more striking as the
story of a dynasty of giants needs women to perpetuate both its protagonists and,
by extension, its narratives. In Rabelais, however, knowledge, experience, laughter and narrative pass directly from father to son, seemingly excluding the

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There are two major obstacles lying in the path of a feminist re-interpretation
of Bakhtin. Firstly, Bakhtins analysis marginalises female bodily specificity.
Throughout his descriptions of the grotesque and classical bodies, womens
biological functions are subsumed into universal experience. Pregnancy and
birth are presented as generative processes common to all rather than as
uniquely female functions. Denied of her real sexual difference, woman is
metaphorized out of existence.6 As a metaphor, her body comes to represent
the processes of male-authored literary creation, but the marks that her subjectivity would make are erased from the text. The second aspect of Bakhtins
gender blindness is his misconception that Rabelais is inscribed in a tradition
which proposes ambivalent rather than negative images of women:7

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possibility of female participation.13 In Charpentiers own formulation, ce

monde se reve`le comme celui dun seul sexe; il nest pas domine par une ideologie masculine, il narrive a` etre que masculin.14 Through her study of
Rabelaiss representational strategies, Charpentier has articulated what Thomas
Laqueur has elsewhere called the one-sex body. Laqueur contends that the
idea of two distinct biological sexes is quite alien to early modern culture.
Instead, there was but one sex whose more perfect exemplars were easily
deemed males at birth and whose decidedly less perfect ones were labeled
female.15 Laqueur adds: in this world, the body with its one elastic sex was
far freer to express theatrical gender and the anxieties thereby produced than it
would be when it came to be regarded as the foundation of gender.16
The interest in Rabelaiss treatment of the female body therefore lies not in
its construction as opposite, or different, from the male body per se, but in its
status as one position on a continuous spectrum of bodily representations.
Rabelaiss preoccupation with exploring the possible diversity and variety (what
Laqueur would call elasticity)17 within this spectrum is demonstrated by the
many different types of body which feature in the work: animal bodies, human
bodies, giant bodies, monstrous bodies. In this context, male/female differentiation appears as but one aspect of variation, rather than as a structuring and
definitive split which creates its own system of classification. In addition, as the
male/female distinction does not in itself create meaning, it follows that the representational strategies at work in the description of the female body are therefore
also sometimes found in the depictions of other bodies, and vice versa.18
What interests me is not so much how the body was understood in literal,
material and medical terms, but rather how Rabelaiss texts demonstrate the
complex interrelationship between sex and gender in the Renaissance. Laqueur
states that the cultural politics of at least two genders is never in equilibrium
with the biology, or alternative cultural politics, of one sex.19 This inability to
achieve equilibrium in a culture where the one-sex body prevails causes representations of the body to oscillate between, on the one hand, the ideological
construction of sex as a continuum and, on the other, confrontation with
socially-constructed gender difference. This oscillation surfaces in the text in the
need to reroute the signs of female gender difference in terms of the welltravelled, familiar paths of the one-sex body. Seen in this light, the female
body emerges, not as has previously been argued by feminist critics as an entity
which is consistently marginalised by and excluded from the text, but as a privileged site which is revisited fleetingly yet persistently during the course of the
work. Rabelaiss text shows a fascination with the female body that initially
comes to light in the first few chapters of Gargantua and resurfaces at intervals
throughout the books.
For Rabelais, the female body is what Kristeva would term the abject.20
Kristeva argues that in order to become a speaking subject, the child abjects
(rejects) the Mother with whom it has until now identified fully and enters the
Symbolic (the world of language and of paternal law). Through language, the

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child gains the means to self-identification and differentiation from the Mother,
yet this self-definition initially takes place within the terms of the original object
of desire the (now prohibited) Mothers body. Kristeva argues that the abject
is what society and the body seek to expel beyond their borders, but it is what
threatens the existence of these boundaries by disrupting them, highlighting
their fragility and inadequacy. In literature, this primal scene of abjection resurfaces in scenes of separation and rejection, which generate a number of
responses in the reader: horror, disgust, discomfort, fascination, curiosity and
laughter.
Throughout Rabelaiss work, the representation of female bodies echoes
Kristevas definition of the abject: un rejete dont on ne se separe pas, dont
on ne se prote`ge pas ainsi que dun objet. Etrangete imaginaire et menace
reelle, il nous appelle et finit par nous engloutir.21 This impossibility of separation from the female body, however much it is desired, comes to dominate
the representation of women in the work. Even though women are pushed
to the margins of the text, excluded from the central group of protagonists,
denied the opportunity to focalise the narrative, they are revealed to be
essential to the development of the narrative because they are called upon to
fulfil reproductive functions, such as childbearing. Like the abject, female
bodies both repel and attract the male narrator and protagonists. The disquiet generated by these opposing impulses is seen most clearly in the
fleeting episodes where male protagonists are dependent on the female body:
reliant on its instability and unpredictability, however unwillingly. Throughout
these encounters the text continually claims to reveal the naked female body,
which is, in fact, always covered over in language, through word play and
imagery.
The discursive void surrounding the female body exists in order to spare
readers the true horror of confronting their own previous existence inside the
maternal body. Hence the abject in literature is also the staging of the exterior/
interior divide. Although the bodies of both sexes in Rabelais are seen to be
abject, female bodies are associated more frequently and in more extreme ways
with abjection than male bodies. Part of this is because of the closer identification of female bodies with the primal scene of abjection: the maternal body.
Rabelaiss fascination with the maternal body surfaces in the text in a number
of ways. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the representation of childbirth,
which holds a peculiar interest for the narrator. Female protagonists appear in
scenes of pregnancy and childbirth where they are otherwise excluded from the
main dynamics of the narrative. This is certainly true in the dynasty of giants,
which excludes women apart from the mothers of the two main protagonists.
Both Gargamelle and Badebec feature only in the episodes which describe
childbearing. They appear as if from nowhere, their lives thus far summarised
in a few lines, and they disappear just as quickly as soon as they have fulfilled
their reproductive function.22 This makes women appear to be necessary only
in that they ensure the continuation of the patrilineal line.

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Le fondement luy escappoit une apresdinee le III. jour de febvrier, par trop avoir mange
de gaudebillaux. Gaudebillaux: sont grasses tripes de coiraux. Coiraux: sont beufz
engressez a` la creche et prez guimaulx. Prez guimaulz: sont qui portent herbe deux fois
lan. (Gargantua, 4: p. 16)

For Gargamelle, the act of giving birth is seen as an inversion of the act of
eating. As she becomes full up with food, so first her intestines and then
Gargantua are expelled into the world as kinds of waste product. The birth is
provoked by Gargamelles excessive consumption of tripe, itself a substance that
promotes speculation about bodies and their processes. This is reflected in
Rabelaiss language: the multiple layers of digestive tubes (tripe) within digestive
tubes (Gargamelles own intestines) are echoed by the many stages of explanation needed to locate the foods origin.
The image of the tripe concretises the fantasy of what it is like to be inside a
body. This is made more immediate for the reader because of the insistence
that it still bears the traces of its previous existence. The tripes former function
is a cause for concern for Grandgousier, who cautions his wife against eating
too much:
Disoit toutesfoys a` sa femme quelle en mangeast le moins, veu quelle aprochoit de son
terme, et que ceste tripaille nestoit viande moult louable. Celluy (disoit il) a grande
envie de mascher merde, qui dicelle le sac mangeue. Non obstant ces remonstrances:
elle en mangea seze muiz, deux bussars, et six tupins. O belle matiere fecale, que doivoit
boursouffler en elle. (Gargantua: 4, p. 17)

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Yet, however much Rabelais may seek to negate the importance of

Gargamelle as mother and child-rearer, the text itself cannot resist the opportunity, afforded by Gargantuas birth, to speculate not only on the workings of the
female reproductive organs, but also on the processes by which the subject
comes into being. Throughout the episode, the female body is seen as an
unstable and poorly-defined entity that inspires disgust. It is seen as fragmented
and incomplete, yet simultaneously overlapping and overflowing. Mouths,
throats, intestines and anuses all compete to evoke the female body, the
processes of which retain their mysterious qualities through the texts imprecise
terminology. The mothers body is seen as a complicated and unpredictable
kind of container, whose previously unknown and hidden passageways and
orifices reveal themselves only partially and sporadically as the episode progresses.23 Even the name Gargamelle (from the Old Provencal meaning large
throat) evokes the way in which the mother is predominantly a bodily opening
through which the unborn child will emerge.
The apparent confusion between the reproductive and digestive tracts is one
of the major themes of the passage and contributes to a vision of the female
body that is both indistinct and threatening.24 This is demonstrated by the way
in which the birth is introduced to the reader:

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Et la tastant par le bas, trouverent quelques pellauderies, assez de maulvais goust, et

pensoient que ce feust lenfant, mais cestoit le fondement qui luy escappoit, a` la mollification du droict intestine, lequel vous appellez le boyau cullier, par trop avoir mange des
tripes comme avons declaire cy dessus. (Gargantua, 6: p. 21)

Gargamelles tripe-eating has caused her own intestines to soften, disintegrate

and become dislodged.26 Central here is the denial of the existence of the
vagina as a distinct bodily orifice. These images which purport to represent the
reproductive organs in terms of the digestive system seek to cover over in
language what would otherwise be exposed by such a seemingly frank description
of childbirth: the maternal body, its sexual difference. The constant references to
the digestive system construct the female reproductive organs in terms of their
safer parallel in the universal male anatomical model. Rabelaiss description of
the birth conceals the vagina and in so doing prevents the reader from being
reminded of his/her own origins. The reader is spared the thought that he/she
too was once part of a female body from which separation was both laborious
and painful.
Within the chaos of the female body, the struggle for self-determination is not
an easy one. This issue is first raised when Grandgousier expresses his concern
about his wifes uncontrollable appetite for tripe. It resurfaces during
Gargantuas birth when the unborn childs battle for survival is mirrored not in
the pain of the mothers body, but in the discomfort experienced by the father.
In particular, proximity to the female body is revealed to be dangerous for
Grandgousier. In keeping with the slippage of anatomical terms, in particular
between the digestive and reproductive tracts, this danger for Grandgousier
emanates not from the vagina, but from the mouth. In the only direct speech
attributed to Gargamelle, she regrets that her husband had not cut off his penis,
which would have saved her the agony of childbirth: Mais pleust a` dieu que
vous leussiez coupe (Gargantua, 6: p. 21). Processes inside the female body have
the potential to damage masculine function and identity.27

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Once contained within an animal for the purpose of digesting food and absorbing it into the body, the tripe is now itself (confusingly) a food. Both Gargamelle
and the tripe are in some respects between states: Gargamelle is on the point
of giving birth and the tripe bridges the rupture between eating and digestion.
Further instability is introduced with the mention that the tripe is on the point
of spoiling: elle feussent pourries. Ce que sembloit indecent (Gargantua: 4,
p. 17). This mention of decay and degradation suggests another way in which
the tripe is a changeable food matter. Furthermore, it shows that although it has
been prepared for consumption carefully, this foodstuff is potentially troubling
for the assembled company on a social as well as on a gastronomic level.25
The confusion between the different parts of the female anatomy is such that
when a form eventually emerges from Gargamelles womb, the midwives
mistakenly take it to be the baby, whereas it is in fact part of her intestine:

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Gargantuas future is made more precarious by the application of an ointment

to Gargamelles reproductive opening, causing it to seize up and thus trapping
the unborn child within his mother:

This intervention by the female company, together with Gargamelles refusal to

stop eating tripe, demonstrates that Gargantua inhabits a space that, unlike the
world into which he is about to emerge, is not regulated by the restrictions and
prohibitions of paternal law.
Unable to trust in his Mothers body or to rely upon the knowledge of the
midwives, Gargantua must become both the agent of his own birth and the
focalisor of the narrative if he is to escape unscathed:
Par cest inconvenient feurent au dessus relaschez les cotyledons de la matrice, par lesquelz sursaulta lenfant, et entra en la vene creuse, et gravant par le diaphragme jusques
au dessus des espaules (ou` ladicte vene se part en deux) print son chemin a` gauche, et
sortit par laureille senestre. (Gargantua, 6: pp. 21 2)

This switch in narrative focus is significant. Previously, the story has been narrated from outside the body. The reader has watched Gargamelles tripe feast,
her labour pains, the application of the ointment and the detachment of the
placenta only as much as the limits of her body would allow them. Crucially,
until Gargantua becomes the agent of the action, the reader has not seen the
unborn child. Now, in order to avoid suffocation and save himself from the
female body, he jumps into his Mothers veins and swims up above the diaphragm to be born through her ear.28 This navigation of the maternal body is a
triumph for patriarchy. The unborn child is no longer at the mercy of the
spasms and vicissitudes of the female body. He can leave behind the Mothers
tubes and passageways, which within the diegesis he and he alone has been
able to read and experience. This unorthodox entry into the world enables
Gargantua to circumnavigate the female reproductive system in order that he
can emerge untainted by contact with the sexual organs. Furthermore, the text
has created a narrative which bypasses the dependence of the unborn child
on the Mothers body and negates the pre-history of the subject by allowing
abjection to predate birth. At the point where the unborn child first enters the
narrative, the primary identification with the Mother has already ended: the
child is already a subject. This shows us that dependence on the maternal body
is prohibited by the male-authored text.
Whilst Gargantuas journey through his Mothers body is a forceful illustration of the struggles that characterise the unborn childs existence,
Pantagruels birth is a warning that birth places both parties in a perilous

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Dont une horde vieille de la compaignie, laquelle avoit reputation destre grande medicine et la` estoit venue de Brizepaille daupres Sainct Genou devant soixante ans, luy feist
un restrinctif si horrible, que tous ses larrys tant feurent oppilez et reserrez, que a` grande
poine avesques les dentz, vous les eussiez eslargiz, qui est chose bien horrible a` penser.
(Gargantua, 6: p. 21)

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35

position which may result in death.29 The association between birth and death
is a brutal reminder that whilst women bring forth life, they are also invested
with the power to take it away. This is highlighted by the way in which
Pantagruels conception and birth are presented in the same phrase as
Badebecs death:

The fact that Badebecs death is announced before the birth itself is described
minimises her impact on the text. Furthermore, the way in which her death is
described as an inevitable consequence of Pantagruels prodigious size suggests
that birth is a process which always compromises subjectivity. No further
description is given of the circumstances of Badebecs death, but the effect of
the bereavement on Gargantua is described.
The birth itself is characterised by the emergence of strange and marvellous
creatures from Badebecs vagina:
Car alors que sa mere Badebec lenfantoit, et que les sages femmes attendoyent pour le
recepvoir, yssirent premier de son ventre soixante et huyt tregeniers chascun tirant par le
licol un mulet tout charge de sel, apre`s lesquelz sortirent neuf dromadaires charges de
jambons et langues de beuf fumees, sept chameaulx chargez danguillettes, puis .XXV.
charretees de porreaulx, daulx, doignons, et de cibotz: ce que espoventa bien lesdictes
saiges femmes, mais les aulcunes dentre elles disoyent. Voicy bonne provision aussy
bien ne beuyons nous que lachement non en lancement, cecy nest que bon signe, ce
sont aguillons de vin. Et comme elles caquetoyent de ces menus propos entre elles,
voicy sorty Pantagruel, tout velu comme un Ours, dont dict une delles en esperit prophetique. Il est ne a` tout le poil, il fera choses merveilleuses, et sil vit il aura de leage.
(Pantagruel, 2: p. 224)

Whilst Bakhtin views this episode as an example of how the bodily depths are
fertile; the old dies in them, and the new is born in abundance (Rabelais and
His World, p. 339), these images seek to distract the reader from the sight of the
female genitals. What is striking in this description of childbirth is the need to
rewrite the female body in terms of external referents. The list of animals which
are pulled from Badebecs womb show her anatomy to be characterised by multiplicity and exotic otherness. The effect of the description is achieved through a
number of oppositions: human/animal; digestion/reproduction; familiar/unexpected. In some senses, this passage could be seen to demonstrate the need to
define the female body through opposition to more stable categories. Yet
from another point of view, the references to foreign animals such as camels
introduce further uncertainties through their association with a different type of
otherness: geographical rather than sexual difference. Both the strangeness of
the items that emerge from Badebecs womb and her death due to Pantagruels

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Gargantua en son eage de quatre cens quatre vingtz quarante et quatre ans engendra
son filz Pantagruel de sa femme nommee Badebec, fille du Roy des Amaurotes en
Utopie, laquelle mourut du mal denfant, car il estoit si merveilleusement grand et si
lourd, quil ne peut venir a` lumiere, sans ainsi suffocquer sa mere. (Pantagruel, 2: p. 222)

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P O L L I E B RO M I LOW

SOCLAS
University of Liverpool
Liverpool L69 7ZR
United Kingdom
AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S

This article has grown from two short articles I wrote for The Rabelais
Encyclopedia, ed. E. Chesney Zegura (Westport, CT, 2004). My thanks go to John
OBrien, who read through a first draft of this article and whose comments
shaped and formed this final version.
NOTES
1

S. Kinser has established that the contexts of the reception of Rabelais are extremely complex,
frequently centring on the religious controversy surrounding the idea of carnival. See Rabelaiss
Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext (Berkeley, 1990). However, I would point out that La Bruye`res famous

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extraordinary size serve to create a male-authored myth of greatness which simultaneously erases female subjectivity.
In conclusion, Rabelaiss text is evidently drawn to the female body, revisiting
it at regular intervals, even as it seeks to marginalise and negate the impact of
female protagonists in the diegesis. In the course of the work, the female body
becomes established as a privileged site onto which the tensions inherent in
the one-sex body are projected. Women in the work are reduced to their
reproductive function through their association with motherhood. This not only
highlights the socially defined role of women as childbearers, but also reinforces
their link to the maternal body. It is through their seemingly inescapable association with the primal scene of abjection that female bodies confront the subject
with the circumstances of its pre-history, experienced retrospectively as anxious
and troubled. This resurfaces in the text through the representation of female
bodies as a threat to male subjectivity in the form both of challenges to individual male protagonists and to wider social frameworks. In order to avert this
confrontation, the text devises representational strategies which cover over the
female body, shrouding it in wordplay and visual imagery which confuse rather
than elucidate its functions and processes. What Rabelaiss text shows us, therefore, is that representations of the female body are less about the interiority of
the female reproductive organs than they are about rewriting this interiority in
terms of the safer, less dangerous one-sex body. Through Rabelais, we understand that the literary text does not always seek to expel the abject beyond its
borders, but rather through language may also seek to cover over and obscure
the very existence of those boundaries. This textual reworking of the abject
allows the perpetual oscillation between attraction and repulsion to become a
driver which propels the narrative.

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condemnation of Rabelais frames the text within the discourses of the disordered, monstrous, female
body and of food, although I accept that this reflects La Bruye`res own style as much as it comments
upon Rabelaiss thematic and representational preoccupations: Marot et Rabelais sont inexcusables
davoir seme lordure dans leurs ecrits: tous deux avaient assez de genie et de naturel pour pouvoir
sen passer, meme a` legard de ceux qui cherchent moins a` admirer qua` rire dans un auteur.
Rabelais surtout est incomprehensible: son livre est une enigme, quoi quon veuille dire, inexplicable:
cest une chime`re, cest le visage dune belle femme avec des pieds et une queue de serpent, ou de
quelque autre bete plus difforme; cest un monstrueux assemblage dune morale fine et ingenieuse,
et dune sale corruption. Ou` il est mauvais, il passe bien loin au-dela` du pire, cest le charme de la
canaille; ou` il est bon, il va jusques a` lexquis et a` lexcellent, il peut etre le mets des plus delicats.
See uvres comple`tes, ed. J. Benda (Paris, 1951; repr. 1984), p. 78.
2
M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN, 1984), p. 23.
3
Rabelais, uvres comple`tes, ed. M. Huchon & F. Moreau (Paris, 1994). All quotations are from
this edition.
4
Interpretation is one of the perennial issues in Rabelais scholarship. See, for example,
G. Defaux, Marot, Rabelais, Montaigne: LEcriture comme presence (Paris, 1987); M. Jeanneret, Le Defi des
signes: Rabelais et la crise de linterpretation a` la Renaissance (Paris, 1992); J. Parkin, Interpreting Rabelais
(Lewiston, NY & Lampeter, 1993); R. L. Regosin, The Ins(ides) and Outs(ides) of Reading: Plural
Discourse and the Question of Interpretation in Rabelais, in: Rabelaiss Incomparable Book: Essays on
His Art, ed. R. La Charite (Lexington, KY, 1986), pp. 59 71.
5
On the one hand, male critics have tended to overlook the role of women in Bakhtins argument. For example, S. Monas follows his explanation of the grotesque body with the clarification
that excrement is the medium that connects earth and body, thus overlooking the role played by
sex-specific bodily features and functions. See Literature, Medicine and the Celebration of the
Body in Rabelais, Tolstoi, and Joyce, in: The Body and The Text: Comparative Essays in Literature and
Medicine, ed. B. Clarke & W. Aycock (Lubbock, TX, 1990), pp. 5776 ( p. 63). On the other hand,
female scholars such as A. Jefferson perceive that the potential for a gender-based reading of
Rabelais was not fully achieved by Bakhtin. She notes in brackets after her discussion of the terracotta figurines of pregnant old women: the figures point to an aspect of the corporeal that neither
Bakhtin nor Sartre had addressed in their consideration of the body and its relation to the Other,
namely pregnancy. See Bodymatters: Self and Other in Bakhtin, Sartre and Barthes, in: Bakhtin
and Cultural Theory, ed. K. Hirschkop & D. Shepherd (Manchester, 1989), pp. 15277 ( p. 166).
6
I borrow this term from E. J. Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature
(Philadelphia, 1993), p. 13.
7
J. Humphries concurs with the view that Rabelaiss treatment of women is ambivalent rather
than misogynist: Together, Gargantua and the Matrice generate a tautology which would appear to be
the very womb, matrice, materia, source, origin, mold, of Rabelais text. And the essential element of
that dialectic, the asymmetrical, heterogenous Other from which all springs and to which all tends,
is the feminine. One must wonder how Rabelais could have become identified with misogyny of any
kind. See The Rabelaisian Matrice, Romanic Review 76 (1985), 251 70 ( p. 266).
8
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 241.
9
Burns, Bodytalk, pp. 1314.
10
For an overview of the role of women in Rabelais, see F. Rigolot, Rabelais, Misogyny, and
Christian Charity: Biblical Intertextuality and the Renaissance Crisis of Exemplarity, PMLA 109
(1994), 22537.
11
W. C. Booth, Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism,
Critical Inquiry 9 (1982), 4576; N. K. Miller, Rereading as a Woman: The Body in Practice, Poetics
Today 6 (1985), 2919; C. Freccero, Damning Haughty Dames: Panurge and the Haulte Dame de
Paris (Pantagruel 14), Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 15 (1985), 5767; E. Chesney-Zegura,
Toward a Feminist Reading of Rabelais, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 15 (1985), 124
34 ( p. 134).
12
Freccero has also conceptualised Rabelaiss treatment of women as an attempted erasure,
but her analysis is more ambiguous on this point as she emphasises that the female body is a privileged site to which the author will repeatedly return during his writing. See The Instance of the
Letter: Woman in the Text of Rabelais, in: Rabelaiss Incomparable Book, ed. La Charite, pp. 45 55
( p. 53). S. Broomhall has considered Rabelaiss treatment of the female body as Other to be symptomatic of the absence of female experience in contemporary medical discourse: Such was its
incomprehensibility that Rabelaiss texts expressed the void of knowledge in the gaping void of the

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vagina: a fearsome and abhorrent reminder of the limitations of individual male experience in the
quest for knowledge. See Rabelais, the Pursuit of Knowledge, and Early Modern Gynaecology,
Limina 4 (1998), 2434 ( p. 32).
13
For a detailed study of the father son dynamic in Rabelais, see C. Freccero, Father Figures:
Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais (Ithaca, NY, 1991).
14
F. Charpentier, Un Royaume qui perdure sans femmes, in: Rabelaiss Incomparable Book, ed. La
Charite, pp. 195209 ( p. 195).
15
T. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA, 1990), p. 124.
16
Ibid., p. 125.
17
Ibid.
18
Much existing work on bodies in Rabelais highlights similar issues of interiority and order to
the ones which I examine with reference to female bodies in this article. See, for example,
M.-M. Fontaine, Quaresmeprenant: limage litteraire et la contestation de lanalogie medicale, in:
Rabelais in Glasgow, ed. J. A. Coleman & C. M. Scollen-Jimack (Glasgow, 1984), pp. 87112.
19
Laqueur, Making Sex, p. 113.
20
For a discussion of Kristevas theory of the abject in relation to medieval fabliaux, see
M. Griffin, Dirty Stories: Abjection in the Fabliaux, New Medieval Literatures 3 (1999), 229 60.
21
J. Kristeva, Pouvoirs de lhorreur: Essai sur labjection (Paris, 1980), p. 12.
22
As Charpentier has pointed out, Dans le Gargantua-Pantagruel se dessine une constellation
familiale dont le centre est, non pas lenfant-heros, mais le Pe`re. Les femmes ny occupent que peu
de place, celle, fonctionnelle, de genitrice. On ne les voit gue`re quaux moments de la conception
(dans le cas de Gargamelle) et de lenfantement (Gargamelle, Badebec) (Un Royaume qui perdure
sans femmes, p. 197). After the birth scene, there is only one further mention of Gargamelle, when
the narrator conveys with indifference the news of her death: A` sa venue ilz le festoyerent a` tour de
bras, jamais on ne veit gens plus joyeux. Car Supplementum Supplementi chronicorum, dict que
Gargamelle y mourut de joye, je nen scay rien de ma part, et bien peu me soucie ny delle ny
daultre (Gargantua, 37: p. 102). The reactions of Grandgousier are unrecorded in the text, although
a whole chapter of Pantagruel is devoted to Gargantuas grief at the death of Badebec (Pantagruel, 3:
pp. 2256).
23
For a reading of Gargantua and Pantagruels births which privileges the ideas of the womb as
a bodily container and metaphor for textual activity, see Humphries, The Rabelaisian Matrice.
24
Bakhtin reads this episode as a regeneration of the people: These images create with great
artistry an extremely dense atmosphere of the body as a whole in which all the dividing lines
between man and beast, between the consuming and consumed bowels are intentionally erased. On
the other hand, these consuming and consumed organs are fused with the generating womb. [. . .]
We see looming beyond Gargamelles womb the devoured and devouring womb of the earth and
the ever-regenerated body of the people (Rabelais and His World, p. 226).
25
M. Jeanneret provides an alternative reading of Gargantuas birth which privileges the celebratory aspects of the social gathering: Ici aussi, une sequence biographique samorce sur un episode
de festin. Un destin individuel sebauche tandis que la collectivite cele`bre sa survie dans le retour
printanier de la germination. Les energies vitales, les forces du renouveau triomphent, manifestees
par deux actes a` peine distincts: procreer et manger. See Ma Patrie est une citrouille: The`mes alimentaires dans Rabelais et Folengo, Etudes de lettres 2 (1984), 2544 ( p. 30).
26
Chesney-Zegura & Tetel perceive this waste product to be ambiguous: her effort to prevent
external waste paradoxically generates internal waste, as the tripe, an organ of digestion, proves indigestible in such vast quantities. Not surprisingly, the stomach cramps that beset Gargamelle shortly
thereafter, while she is dancing and cavorting, are a combination of labor, indigestion, food poisoning, and sheer gluttony. See Rabelais Revisited (New York, 1991), p. 61.
27
I accept that the potential for damage is not realised here. I further acknowledge that such a
display of aggression is a common and recognisable symptom of the transition phase of labour.
28
This episode has been read by some scholars as an ironic inversion of aural reception of the
news of the Virgin Marys pregnancy. See, for example, J-C. Sournia, Le Vocabulaire medical de
Rabelais, in: Rabelais pour le XXI`eme sie`cle, ed. M. Simonin (Geneva, 1998), pp. 291 7
( p. 292). J. Schwartz views this episode as a medical parody which exploits the incomplete physiology of the time. See Irony and Ideology in Rabelais: Structures of Subversion (Cambridge, 1990), p. 53.
29
Bakhtin offers an alternative interpretation of Pantagruels birth: This is the theme already
familiar to us from the Roman carnival of combined killing and childbirth. Here, the killing is done
by the newborn himself, in the very act of birth (Rabelais and His World, p. 329). Charpentier views

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the birth as disquieting: aux debuts de sa vie, Pantagruel porte encore la marque de cette oscillation
entre bienfait et mefait, entre vie et mort, but situates this interpretation within a specific literary
tradition: les naissances, dans les recits fabuleux, forment un episode symbolique qui signale ou
signe le destin du heros; la mort de sa me`re peut marquer son apparition (Un Royaume qui
perdure sans femmes, p. 97).

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