The Complexion of Compassion: The Face and Racial Difference in Scudéry's Clélie

Abstract:In its proliferation of portraits, Madeleine de Scudéry's 'Clélie' (1654–1661) teaches its readers to search for the light of compassion in the faces of her most noble heroes. At one level, I argue, Scudéry's thematization of compassion reflects its new political function in the wake of the Fronde: compassion is not, as it was during the Religious Wars, an affect that allows a feeling subject to cross or reinforce lines of religious difference; here it provides an affective basis for political obligation, one that binds nobility and the Crown in the recognition of one another's claims. But as compassion moves to the surface of the face, it begins intersecting with other social processes. Scudéry's persistent attention to the inclinations of complexion situates the heroic face firmly within the circulation of heterosexual desire and procedures of racialization. In this way, the compassionate face reflects a changing social structure and expresses a new articulation of power, desire, and race.